wondering if there is any advantage in giving lots of memory to apps that are savvy to temporary memory
If the app uses temp memory, then it should never need to have it's direct allocation increased. But there are exceptions... For example - iCab. It's happy with its base allocation, until you open pages with large Flash files. The new Flash plug-in is now temp mem aware, but not 100% aware it would seem. I've found a couple of pages that couldn't be viewed until I gave iCab an extra 512K.
(am puzzled as to how it can hurt - you mention a case).
Two scenarios:
1. App tries to do its own memory management. eg: IE. It loves using all that memory, but manages it with very poor/slow algorithms. So the more you use it with lots of memory, the slower it gets - until you "clear" it by quit & relaunch.
2. System becomes real-memory poor because big apps are running. This forces memory pages that want to be active to be continually paged out to disk. This is called "thrashing". Your system spends more time trying to move memory to/from the hard drive than it does actually doing real work.
Of course, it is wise I expect to give lots where one is not sure how clever the app is...
heh. See (2) above. The driver needs a car suited to his needs - not too overpowered and not too large. Overpower causes you to crash into things. Too large causes you to have problems parking...
- Dan.
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