No More Swapping

time to read 3 min | 434 words

I'm getting another 1Gb of RAM tomorrow. My main machine has 1Gb of RAM, and I constantly has to monitor the memory usage because I use a lot of applications simultaneity. Right now I'm using 967Mb:

  • Outlook is the usual culprit, with 91Mb.
  • RssBandit add another 68Mb to the pressure.
  • NAnt is currently compiling Castle, so it's happily eating 110Mb.
  • WBEditor (which I use to write this post) is taking a hefty 59Mb to allow me to do that
  • Firefox is no mincemeat with 55Mb taken.
  • Winword is active because I'm writing a mail message, add another 48Mb to the cake.
  • SQLServer is a modesy 46Mb
  • Explorer is another 30Mb

I'm reporting only the current mem usage, there is also the peak mem usage to consider, since I don't see it being returned the the free memory pool until the process is closed. And I've not even talked about the amount of memory Visual Studio feels free to grab. While I wrote this post the memory usage went up to 1037Mb, the peak memory usage for this machine is 1.5Gb.

I'm pretty pissed that I need to do that, even though the last upgrade I made on this computer was over a year ago, I expect 1Gb to last, damn it. The one thing that I can't stand is when I'm thinking faster than the computer can follow. The problem is that the moment that this starts, I can feel the thoughts going away, and I know that I'm going to lose them while I wait the computer to finish whatever it is that it is doing.

Swapping is a great idea, but it make the computer totally unusable for the user seating in fornt of it. It breaks every assumtion that you have with regard to cheap/costly operations. To everyone who says that memory is cheap, consider this: I'm probably going to break Outlook 2003, since it's not capable of handling more than 1Gb of RAM (but it has a hotfix).