Quote:
Originally posted by rlbell+Apr 21 2006, 11:53 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (rlbell @ Apr 21 2006, 11:53 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>
Quote:
Originally posted by plix@Apr 12 2006, 10:53 AM
XP has a hard limit of 4GB which is a hardware limitation as well as a software one.* 32 bit processors simply cannot address more than 4GB (2^32 bits) and while I believe there are some Intel-specific extensions to deal with enlarging the address space, I double checked the Microsoft documentation of the issue and all 32b versions of Windows are still subject to this limit.
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There are workarounds for this. [/b]
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<!--QuoteBegin-rlbell
These are snippets of code that grab dynamically allocatable memory, but never give it back, even after it is finished with it.* The amount of memory available goes down, and the swap file gets bigger; until, the computer can only run by thrashing the disk.* This is why it is a good idea to reboot your system periodically to keep it running fast for the rest of the time.[/quote]
Virtual memory essentially solves this problem as, when the process is killed, the virtual address space is freed and all associated memory freed. Try running a test program which malloc()s a lot of memory but doesn't free it, then kill it -- the allocated memory will be freed by the OS.