Bill, Many thanks, like Marta I am glad to be educated on this, and yes she was right there were others of us that needed this and just didn't have her guts to ask.
John R. On Apr 29, 2004, at 9:25 AM, Bill Rising wrote: > On 4/28/04 19:37, Marta Edie wrote > >> Well, here comes the ignorant old lady again. I know you know it all, >> but I have no idea what swap files are. And where do you find them >> and what are they supposed to do and are or are not doing? And what >> garbage is not collected? I am sure there are others on this list who >> don't know and would like to, just don't have my fortitude in asking. > > Launching applications, opening documents, surfing the web all cause > the > operating system to allocate memory to hold relevant data and commands > to > process the data (such as where windows are and what they need to > display). Typically, this memory comes from RAM (random access memory) > of > some sort. If the computer needs to allocate more memory than it has in > RAM, it moves some of the non-recently used info into Virtual Memory > (VM), which is really in a file on a disk. Since memory is being > swapped, > the files which hold the stuff in virtual memory are called swap files. > > Large amounts of swap files is worrisome on a machine with a lot of > RAM, > because there should be little need for the swap files. If there are > too > many, it might be because applications are not telling the operating > system that they no longer need the memory they asked for, and they > keep > asking for new memory (this is a memory leak), or because memory is not > deallocated when applications quit (lack of garbage collection). > > This info could be wrong in the details, because it is inferred from > reading, and not from actually reading up on how memory allocation > works. > Still, it should be roughly correct. > > Bill > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be May 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> > | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup> > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
