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From: mks@cbmvax.commodore.com (Michael Sinz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Memory Alloc during Duplicate (WB)
Message-ID: <22535@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 18 Jun 91 13:04:04 GMT
References: <1991Jun18.084313.25813@rulway.LeidenUniv.nl>
Reply-To: mks@cbmvax.commodore.com (Michael Sinz)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 34

In article <1991Jun18.084313.25813@rulway.LeidenUniv.nl> breemen@rulcvx.LeidenUniv.nl (E. van Breemen) writes:
>
>Normally I am using a SHELL instead of the WB to do things on my Amiga. A
>friend of mine said something strange about the Duplicate function of
>the WB. He said that during a duplicate of an empty(!) directory the WB
>allocates all the memory available in the Amiga (only +- 10K chip left).
>He has an Amiga with 1Mb. I have checked this on my Amiga with 3Mb. The
>same thing happened on my machine. Appearantly, the WB needs 2.8 Mb to
>duplicate an empty directory. Why is that? Commodore does know of the
>fact that intuition crashes under low memory conditions. I have been
>able to crash my Amiga relativly easy. I hope this has been fixed under
>2.0 for more stability.

Oh, you did not know of the "Eat all memory" function that workbench
calls whenever it does something like copy a file?  ;^)

Yes, I know that was a problem in 1.x of workbench.  2.04 does not have
this problem.  In fact, it should work rather well in the copy area as
I had completely redone it.  Copies on a single floppy will only take one
swap (assuming you have the memory) but it will only use the memory it needs
to do the copy.  It also copies a bit faster than before.

In addition to this, the system is now completely stable under low memory
conditions in 2.04.  You can bring the system down to 0 bytes free and it
will not crash.  You may not be able to do anything usefull, but it will
not crash.

/----------------------------------------------------------------------\
|      /// Michael Sinz  -  Amiga Software Engineer                    |
|     ///                   Operating System Development Group         |
|    ///   BIX:  msinz      UUNET:  rutgers!cbmvax!mks                 |
|\\\///                                                                |
| \XX/     "I don't think so" said Ren'e Descartes, then he vanished.  |
\----------------------------------------------------------------------/