memory management

[gusl]

In my experience, Linux is as bad as Windows. I'm routinely having to wait 5 minutes for my screen to process a simple "minimize" click.

What the hell is my computer doing that's keeping it so busy? My guess is it's swapping memory with the HD, since this only happens when I have "too many" things open.

Another solution would be to save the inactive current processes to the HD, free up the memory, and *only* load them up when requested (instead of juggling things around all the time).

Does anyone know how to turn off memory swapping? I would prefer to get an error message: "memory is full". Does anyone know which process corresponds to the screen / user input, so I can up its priority?

Why is the software of today still oblivious to the user's experience?

Comments

[dusc.livejournal.com]

I routinly turn off swapping on Windows machines, and I've seen similar problems on other systems, but not for many years. It could be the you're overusing RAM, and forcing the thing to swap like mad.
Kill the swap space, and you'll probably get an error return on a process or two, which may be nothing more than a number representing an "out of memory error". The memory hog itself may cause another app to die before it kills itself, or it may back off on the memory grabbing, letting others die around it; depends on the coders.
If it's not a configuration error, and it is just a memory overuse, then having more physical memory is the best responce.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

However much memory you give me, I will leave too many things open, unless the system reminds me to clean up my shit (but as I argued in the post, that shouldn't be necessary if they saved my memory to HD instead of swapping).

[dusc.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't take too long for anyone who makes GUIs to slap togeather a little warning app, which periodically monitors free memory and opens a live report window if it falls/stays below a warning level, ironically consuming more resources. It wont use much CPU time at all if you sleep 1 full second between each check cycle.

Your suggestion for saving things to the HD is basically what swapping does. The only difference seems to be in the application being fully inactive until the user (you) reactivates it, instead of waking up to do trivial little things. Sounds like an application level edit to me.
I don't know what you're running, but does your OS allow you to manually "Pause" a process?