Re: Sort memory not being released

In article <20030617212500.GO40542@flake.decibel.org>,
Jim C. Nasby <jim@nasby.net> wrote:
>Of course I wasn't planning on sucking down a bunch of memory and
>holding on to it. :)

What are you worried about?  The unused portions will eventually be paged
out to disk.  On the next sort, you'll spend a little less time allocating
the memory (saving time) and a little more time paging the disk in (taking
time).  Probably, all in all, you'll end up breaking even.

Just because your process has access to a lot of memory, doesn't mean that
it's all in physical memory at once.

Unless your system ran out of physical memory and/or swap, there shouldn't
be an issue.

It may well be than when you up the sort memory, you may also have to up
swap space.  No big deal.

mrc

--
     Mike Castle      dalgoda@ix.netcom.com      www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen
fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different"); -- gcc