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I think most computing environments do have a user of, if you consider a "user" to be something that be notified and can act on such notifications (e.g. to close applications).

Your music software's problem seems to be a bad algorithm - not that it doesn't check the return values of the `*alloc` functions.Aas you say, it should be able to process the audio in constant space. While I assume that I can always acquire memory, I do still care about the space-efficiency of my software.

I must admit I've never seen my system depending on swap, so I don't know how bad it is. But, if you have 1GB of on-RAM memory already allocated, wouldn't it only be new processes that are slow?

Also, I'd again point out that if you don't like swap, you don't have to have one.




> if you have 1GB of on-RAM memory already allocated, wouldn't it only be new processes that are slow?

No - the memory sub system, will swap out pages based on usage and some other parameters. A new application would most likely result in already running applications least used pages being swapped out.


I must admit I've never seen my system depending on swap, so I don't know how bad it is.

Just for fun, try deliberately creating a swap storm some time. Then try to recover from it :-). Do this on a system that doesn't have other users.




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