[Wine] Re: Memory Use

[Duane Clark]

CWO4 Dave Mann wrote:
> Daniel Skorka wrote:
> 
>> CWO4 Dave Mann <misterfixit at loveable.com> wrote:
>>> I've noticed since d/l and installing latest WINE that when I fire up an
>>> application requiring WINE, the "wine-preloader" jumps to 1.7 Gigs in
>>> VmSize.  I have a 2.0 GB RAM system but this action by the pre-loader
>>> slows everything down to a low crawl.
>> You mean that after starting up eg winecfg, you have 1.7 gigabytes of
>> free memory (RAM and swap combined) less?
>>
>> Daniel
> 
> In the list of processes Vm Size shows as 1,755,045;  Perhaps I am mistaking
> that reading for actual memory use?  The empirical result is that the
> system slows down quite obviously.

The virtual memory is not real memory. Wine "reserves" a very large 
block of virtual memory for reasons that have something to do with 
guaranteeing that certain memory addresses that some Windows programs 
expect are available. But most of it will never actually be used, and it 
will never get pulled into real memory.

The system should not slow down when using Wine, especially if you have 
2GB of real memory, unless you already have the memory almost full with 
other programs. Running Wine on a system with only 500MB, Wine is still 
consuming 1.6GB of virtual memory. Both everything else still runs fine.