None taken. I guess because I haven't really had the need to know more than I do about it. Maybe you can enlighten me. Can you explain to me why my xp installation behaved much more snappy after I moved the page file into a ram disk? Is swap really useful these days, or is the overhead too wasteful? Is it perhaps a crutch from the time it was necessary but now only lives on because of a kind of learned helplessness from programmers who don't need to care about modestly allocating memory?
You likely had much more ram than the average person did, right? My understanding was XP was based around the needs of the average consumer and wrote the OS in such a way as to almost mandate swapping rather than writing something smarter that could avoid swapping if the machine had more than enough ram.
Because that swapping would occur regardless, there would be a performance penalty when you didn't actually need it. Pointing the swap back to ram circumvented that.
I wouldn't say it's a crutch as there are still plenty of users machines and situations where ram might run out, so swapping is better than the apps crashing. But yes it's becoming increasingly obsolete.
