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Message: [QUOTE="Dan Pop, post: 2386525"] Exactly 10 years ago, I've got a low end Alpha DEC/OSF1 system as my desktop machine. The thing had 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of swap, which was quite reasonable for a Unix workstation at the time (Linux was perfectly happy with a lot less). Without lazy swap allocation, by the time my X session had started, most of the swap space was already allocated. After starting a few X clients, the system was out of virtual memory resources. Since increasing the size of the swap partition was not very practical, I tried switching to lazy swap allocation. The effects were impressive: at the end of the X session startup procedure, not a single page of swap space was allocated. I could start as many X clients as I needed without using more than half of my swap space. The only time when I ran into troubles was when a netscape process got mad... Sad conclusion: in the presence of so much software that overallocates memory, lazy swap allocation is a must for people who cannot afford wasting virtual memory resources. With the cheap disks of today, this is far less an issue today than it was back then, however. Dan [/QUOTE]