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