[Xitami] Memory allocation

[Paul Reid]

 > let Windows determine its own virtual memory or should I just
set it 10Gb?

Ideally, if speed matters, you NEVER want to swap. Physical drives are 
1,000 times slower than DRAM. If you catch it touching the drive for 
swap, and speed is money, buy it more RAM. So the size of the swap space 
does not matter.

You do need swap space "in case" some app goes off the rails and starts 
allocating infinite memory. But a big swap space just leaves it swapping 
many seconds longer before the crash. You want a small swap space so 
that when the memory allocator sees it is in trouble, it has a little 
headroom for its error processes. A Gig or three seems plenty. I thought 
64MB was enough to make some RAM space for the error handlers to throw a 
mystery message before the machine just got stuck.

 > I wish there was a way to completely dedicate, within Windows, 
physical ram to specific apps.

Either it gets the memory it wants, or it doesn't. If Xitami can't get 
its modest memory needs, then one of the monster svchost.exe processes 
is sure to fail a malloc just about the same time, and the whole box 
goes down. Either you have enough, or you don't.

 > soooo many people have said on many many occasions not to use Xitami 
for production.

Who? Why? Anyway "they" also said that about Win-Apache for many years, 
it was official project policy. In fact both servers seem to be more 
stable than Windows, and a clean installation of Win Server O/S is the 
next best thing to a stripped unix or OS/2.

Are you the guy with the enormous real-estate database? Some projects 
like eBay or Amazon or WayBack are simply too much for any one machine. 
Distributed and cluster work is mature stuff; fortunately I never needed 
to look into it for my modest needs. You may be near that point.

  -PRR