On Fri, 4 May 2012, Scott Ferguson wrote:
On 04/05/12 04:54, Bret Busby wrote:
<snip>
Out of interest, with you saying that swapping is not mandatory, from memory, about 20-odd years ago, when I started learning (formally) about operating systems, we were told that UNIX has a memory requirement of about 32GB (or, it may have been 32MB - I am not sure - it was many, many, years ago, and thus, UNIX requires memory paging to work, and this is why UNIX has had such (relatively) good memory handling, because it used memory paging; paging out to hard disk, and, without the paging, UNIX could not have operated.32MB - back then. All that is correct, especially then. Now RAM is cheaper and so it's used in preference to disk (swap). Some apps, notably Firefox/Iceweasel, will use all the RAM they can get - and be called hogs, whereas they're just trying to be efficient and will release memory when another app calls for it.
And, Iceweasel (and it may have happened with the iceape browser; I am not sure - have not used it for a couple of weeks, now, I think) has a habit of leaving fragments of dialogue boxes on top of everything else on the desktop, hiding parts of the screen with the dialogue box fragments, which only disappear when I kill or crash iceweasel. The only thing that displays on top of the dialogue box fragments, is when I invoke the screensaver, which overwrites evrything on the screen (at least, for the present time)
I would include a screenshot showing this, but I do not know whether this mailing list allows attachments.
-- Bret Busby Armadale West Australia .............. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means." - Deep Thought, Chapter 28 of Book 1 of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy In Four Parts", written by Douglas Adams, published by Pan Books, 1992 ....................................................