Windows FE memory management
- To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
- Subject: Windows FE memory management
- From: p.kent at ic.ac.uk
- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 15:15:10 +0100
Dear MathGroup, does anyone understand how the PC Windows front end performs its memory management? I ask this after trying to run Math'ca 2.2 on a PC with just 4MB of RAM. Plotting a few graphs quickly eats up the RAM and puts the FE into severe difficulties. 2.1 handled this quite well but 2.2 starts printing a cascade of "low memory" warning messages---so many that the FE completely freezes and the only way out is to kill the Mathematica process. What I'd like to know: 1) Are there any useful tricks for running the front end with a very small RAM space? 2) Is it possible to recover the space occupied by previous graphical output? 3) How *does* the FE manage memory? What exactly is the meaning of the "bytes free" number in the bottom right corner of the screen? Does the FE use virtual memory? I've tried creating a large swap space in Windows for the FE to use, but it has irregular and marginal effects on performance. For background: I'm part of a project which is writing tutorial notebooks for first-year undergraduate mathematics. We want to use graphics as much as possible in our presentation, and we have to teach on 4MB PCs, thus creating the memory problems. Our target users are mostly computer novices, so we can't expect them to perform dirty workarounds like saving notebooks and starting again. And we don't want all our graphics to be pre-drawn, the users should be plotting as they work through the notebook. Phillip Kent Transitional Mathematics Project Imperial College London.