[Wine] Re: 64-bit OS, WINE and Memory (size) related question.

imatechguy wineforum-user at winehq.org
Wed May 13 22:45:18 CDT 2009


vitamin wrote:
> Wine being a 32-bit program can not use more then 4GB at a time. Neither can 32-bit windows programs. In reality it's even less then 4GB (maximum is around 3 .. 3.5).
> 
> The extra RAM is always beneficial to a system performance one way or the other. So having more memory then Wine knows what to do with will still help other parts of the system to run better/faster.


Yep, totally on board with the memory addressing limitation of a 32-bit system and/or program.  Actually that's kind of what spawned my post.  Being as there is that limitation how effective will Linux and WINE be at "sharing" the available memory and given some of the posts regarding how WINE allocates virtual memory would it even be beneficial having more than 2-4Gb?  

L.Rahyen touched on this but lets say for example I have 8Gb of RAM.  64-bit Linux boots up and goes nuts filling as much as it can.  Now I load up a game using WINE. If I have 1 full Gig of non-RAM system memory(GPU, Sound Card, etc.), then WINE should only be able to use 3Gb of RAM regardless of how much is available.  So does WINE get as much as it can use from my Linux distro or just whats available that Linux hasn't yet gobbled up?  I realize that's rather oversimplified but it's the best way to explain what I'm thinking.

I did run top as suggested and it showed that even with just my current 2Gb of RAM I was only using 88-92k of Swap before and after loading NWN2 and I still had a good bit over 300,000k of RAM available.  Before you ask, yes - I loaded past the menu screens and actually into a saved game file. :D 

 Thoughts?







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