ASU - out of memory?

[Tilman Baumann]

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:42:52 +0200 Tilman Baumann <tilman at baumann.name> babbled:
> 
> no.. you need to find who is leaking memory and beat them up! :) seriously.
> 128m is more than enough. it's almost overkill. needing swap (on a device like
> the freerunner) is a sign of "stupid programming" :)

I understand your Argument and it is true. But the conclusion is wrong.
Even if you don't have obvious leaks, some memory will not be used most 
of the time and can be safely dumped out of the RAM.
Like some background process which is sleeping almost all the time. Or 
other multitasked apps which are not used currently.
Or all the fat frameworks which probably take some memory for code or 
data which are almost never used.

All this memory is wasted on valuable RAM. Even if only a hand full of 
pages end on swap, they are saved from clogging up RAM.

And using huge amounts of virtual memory is not necessarily a effect of 
a memory leak. Virtual memory is almost free after all on all other 
linux systems.

And another point is just the more graceful effect when memory really 
becomes low.
You feel the speed impact. You feel that something needs to be done. Or 
  some popup can ask the user for some intervention - all before it is 
too late.

As i said, swap on flash sound crazy. But i had this experience on my 
Nokia 770 (64Mb RAM). Even if i was not always on the memory limit, it 
felt instantaneously better and more stable.

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