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.