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| Thread ID: 50561 | 2004-10-24 21:34:00 | Warped question for the weekend | dude (6318) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 284276 | 2004-10-24 21:34:00 | What would life be like if any operating sysytem DIDN'T have virtual memory aka swap file ?? Would everyone have a gig of ram? Would it be cheap? Would programs be made different? |
dude (6318) | ||
| 284277 | 2004-10-24 23:34:00 | Well, I'd say it would just go on as usual :) In Windows 98 you can have zero swap file length if you have enough ram, just have to add an entry into system.ini. |
Terry Porritt (14) | ||
| 284278 | 2004-10-24 23:38:00 | I have a feeling that Photoshop requires a pagefile... I could be wrong but I think this was a problem I ran into a few years ago - new versions may be different. So you'd have to make sure all programs you were running didn't require a PF. - David |
DangerousDave (697) | ||
| 284279 | 2004-10-24 23:47:00 | due to the cost of ram there would be less people with pc's. i doubt the cost of ram would come down at all. its a fairly competative market allready. i think programmers would be looking at every possible way to design a program to run on as liitle memory as possible. however someone would simply make there own swapfile, even if its only for their own program. |
tweak'e (174) | ||
| 284280 | 2004-10-25 00:01:00 | Under Linux, if you don't want a swap file (partition) you simply do not create one or disable the mounting of that partition. I accidently deleted my swap partition once and it made no difference to the system performance (machine had 384 MB RAM). Linux uses memory differently to how Windows handles it. | Jen C (20) | ||
| 284281 | 2004-10-25 06:31:00 | Speaking on behalf of the truely ignorant, is virtual memory a bad thing? Is that the point? | Winston001 (3612) | ||
| 284282 | 2004-10-25 06:40:00 | Buggered if I know. Ask tweak'e. ;-) :D | dude (6318) | ||
| 284283 | 2004-10-25 06:40:00 | Winston, I dont understand their point. V/M is not bad. It requires a certain ammount of free disk space be maintained somewhere, so that it can be used if nessecary. Apart from my Tv card, my system only uses 200 m of VM because I go out of the way to make this happen. I have 1G ram. 3.7g swap. If you multi task you are more likley to use it. If you need it and its not there you will probably crash. D. |
drb1 (4492) | ||
| 284284 | 2004-10-25 06:43:00 | virual memory is basicly useing the harddrive as ram. unforunatly the hardrive is very slow compared to ram hence the pc runs slower. | tweak'e (174) | ||
| 284285 | 2004-10-25 06:43:00 | Yes, Virtual Memory is hundreds of times slower than RAM. Basically (AFAIK) it was designed as a sorta "overflow" so that applications that were using too much RAM could "overflow" into the Swap File (Or usually partition in Linux) rather than being forced to close a program etc. Basically its for those who dont have enough ram, or those who run Windows.... For some odd reason whenever Ive started a Windows box, its insisted on using the SWAP file?? Im using Gentoo Linux and am using 335MB of my 512MB Ram... And none of my 900MB Swap Partition. Its only been used on the odd occasion (Such as when I was compiling Kde, firefox, thunderbird, and gaim all at once... It ended up using about 20 megs of it) but never does it get used on startup. So because of the speed thing, Swap is bad, but was good back in the days when people were limited to 16 megs of RAM. Hope this helps Chill. |
Chilling_Silence (9) | ||
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