Excessive Swap with MSVC++ and Wine

[Stephen Mollett]

On Sunday 27 Apr 2003 14:51, Phil Thompson wrote:
> The problem is the amount of memory used by link.exe. At the moment, with
> 256M of real memory and 1G of swap I quickly run out. Under Windows2000, on
> the same machine, the link takes a long time (30mins - 1 hour) but does
> complete.

That sounds very similar to a problem I used to have with another program. I 
used to run NewsXpress under Wine (quite a nice, and somewhat non-traditional 
in design, newsreader) but I found that, even with 1GB of RAM, I had to add 
lots of swap in order to download large numbers of headers. When I used to 
run it on Windows, I was able to get tens or hundreds of thousands of headers 
in 128MB RAM without even approaching the point where swapping would be 
needed.

I think it may be some inefficiency in Wine's memory allocation subsystem - 
perhaps it consistently allocates too much which mounts up each time the 
program requests more. (When I exited NewsXpress, only about half of the 
memory it had claimed was freed; the rest had to be reclaimed with 'killall 
wine'.)

Doesn't help you very much, but perhaps it might help someone to track down 
the problem.

Stephen