Henry Rich <henryhr...@nc.rr.com> wrote: > Roger just asks the OS for memory when he wants it and says 'out of > memory' if he can't get what he asks for. If Mac OS freezes when he > does that, bad on it.
The issue is much more complex than this. MacOS, like most OSes, overcommits memory -- it lets programs allocate memory even when there isn't enough for all memory allocations combined (for all running processes) to fit. The reason most OSes do this is that it almost always works very well, and when it fails it can be "fixed" by killing processes (but odds are you're killing fewer than you'd have to kill if you hadn't allowed the allocation). With that said, it's quite likely that the OS designers would be happy to find an easy way to break their memory allocator so that they can produce more graceful behavior under pressure -- I've seen similar problems taken seriously by the Linux people. > Henry Rich -Wm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
