[Info-vax] Running Alpha VMS under the ES40 emulator

[David Froble]

Johnny Billquist wrote:

> Memory usage and allocation patterns in most programs means that it's 
> easy to allocate new chunks of memory, but it is hard to ever return any 
> memory to the OS.
> The OS never reclaims anything until the program exits. Programs 
> explicitly have to give the memory back to the OS. Normal memory 
> allocation routines don't return any memory to the OS. They keep it 
> around for later. (And because it is damned hard to return the memory.)

I'm going to object to such a statement.  Freeing memory is easier than 
acquiring it.  Now, determining what can be freed may be a tougher job.

This all goes back to good design and programming practices.  I can 
imagine someone programming with no intention of ever freeing memory.

In my database product, memory is acquired for I/O buffers and other 
data structures.  When a file is closed, all the memory is returned to 
the OS.  It's not rocket science, just good design and coding ...