charles@tasis.utas.oz.au@munnari.oz (Charles Lakos) (09/16/89)
I would like to know a bit more about Multifinder memory management. The specific situation concerns a DRVR which is permanently resident (once installed) which requests activation once every 60th of a second. (For information, it is a screen saver cum general timing utility.) The recent Tech note (#248) on the subject points out that with Multifinder active, the current heap zone may not be the one you expect. That's OK. The DRVR allocates a couple of small blocks of memory (for regions) but tries to clean up on exit by compacting the memory every now and then. With Finder this works marvellously - the DRVR cleans up the machine's memory while it is idle. With MultiFinder, it seems to suffer heap fragmentation, so that after a day's operation, it may not be able to find 1 meg of memory on a 5 meg mac II. So what is to be done? Is this an inevitable consequence of MultiFinder switching in the DRVR so frequently? Is there a better way of ensuring that a couple of small blocks allocated frequently (and deallocated) do not result in heap fragmentation? Charles Lakos. IP: charles@tasis.utas.oz.au Snail: Computer Science Dept., University of Tasmania, GPO Box 252C, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia. Charles Lakos. ACSnet: charles@tasis.utas.oz ARPA: charles%tasis.utas.oz.au@uunet.uu.net UUCP: {enea,hplabs,mcvax,uunet,ukc}!munnari!tasis.utas.oz!charles Snail: Computer Science Dept., University of Tasmania, GPO Box 252C, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia.