Agreed. Asking the OS for the amount of free memory is mostly useless, since the OS might decide to use large portions for buffering. If you want free memory, don't put it into the computer.

A better test is to start a program that needs much memory. If it exceeds the amount of "free" memory, the OS starts to give up file caches, and the program start succeeds even though it needs more memory than what was reported as "free".

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re^2: memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris. by moritz
in thread memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris. by Workplane

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