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0 pointsscott_s14y ago0 comments

I suspect you don't know what virtual memory is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699481

0 comments

jff14y ago

Yes, I know what virtual memory is, I'm a computer engineer and I work on operating systems. I'm just extremely impressed that they needed 1.5 GB of address space, for christ's sake.

Insert here some pithy comment about Apollo missions and Twitter, or whatever.

scott_sOP14y ago

The reason I suspected that is grabbing 1.5 GB of virtual memory doesn't mean much. It just means you asked the OS to change its book-keeping to allow you to access that much. Applications and libraries that aggressively cache and prefetch routinely do that sort of thing.

dchest14y ago

The reason for acquiring a lot of virtual memory is to save memory and improve performance.

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