[softwarelist] Re: A quiet time?

  • From: David Pilling <flist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: davidpilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 18:16:53 +0100

In message <4e729cde98mailing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Peter Newble <mailing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

In article <6qeWo5AN6NKFFwrW@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Pilling
<flist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My feeling is that things would be less likely to crash and
more responsive if you referenced all the images in the
document . . .
That is certainly my experience.

One of those things... back when the foundations of RISC OS and the applications that run on it were written, memory was scarce and support for an address space bigger than installed RAM (virtual memory) was not forthcoming. Acorn encouraged the use of "sliding block, self compacting" memory management.


Such a system is very efficient, however it is prone to bugs, it will not work happily on a virtual memory system (which is why Clares virtual memory system never caught on) and if you get a lot more memory without a corresponding increase in speed of shifting memory contents around it is likely to be slow.

I'm not making excuses, but what ran merrily in 1992 on 4MB might not with 20 times the memory.

Having said that the Windows version of OP does not seem so bad - faster hardware, and making use of Windows massive address space, so although there is still some sliding memory it does not have to slide so often.



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David Pilling
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