On 29.06.2008 05:38, CET - what odd quirk of fate caused Ken Whiton to
generate the following:? :
> *-* On Sat, 28 Jun 2008, at 20:55:34 +1000,
> *-* In Article J_ydnZUVo-iBhPvVnZ2dnUVZ_szinZ2d@mozilla.org,
> *-* Daniel wrote
> *-* About Re: Firefox 3 still hogs memory
>
>
>> Ron Hunter wrote:
>>
>
>
>>> MS recommends 2.5 x real ram for the swapfile. I am not sure just
>>> why, but I suspect this is to save time maintaining the file when
>>> in the swap process.
>>>
>
>
>> Always interested me.....the more RAM you have to do things in, the
>> more Swap file you were supposed to allocate!!
>>
>
>
>> Back in the days of 640kbytes of RAM, I could see why you might
>> allocate heaps of HD as a swapfile, but when you've got 100's of MB
>> or even GBytes of RAM, why should you then need to allocate any of
>> your HD??
>>
>
> Two reasons: multitasking and software bloat. Back in the days
> of 640 KB neither the CPUs nor the OSs were capable of much (if any)
> multitasking, so there was little or no need for swapping.
> Furthermore, back in the days before HDs were available in PCs
> programs had to be able to fit on a 360 KB (or even a 180 KB) floppy,
> so programmers had to write tight, efficient code. Compare that with
> the size and complexity of (most of) today's programs, which, by
> virtue of that size and complexity require much more RAM to operate
> in.
>
> Ken Whiton
>
> FIDO: 1:132/152
> InterNet: kenwhiton@surfglobal.net.INVAL (remove the obvious to reply)
>

Ho, Ken - you also remember the 8" days of single and double-sided
floppies? those were the days when a floppy really *WAS* a floppy (and
don't get your sticky fingers on the read-slot)

reg