Re: about memory (on winnt)

["R.G.S." <rgs1967(at)hotmail.com>]

Craig Markwardt <craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu> wrote in message
onofsm8ctn.fsf@cow.physics.wisc.edu">news:onofsm8ctn.fsf@cow.physics.wisc.edu...
>
> The answer is also "it depends," because it depends on which platform
> you are using.  I believe that under Windows the memory is actually
> returned to the OS.  Thus, other programs are able to use the memory
> again.


Just for curiosity's sake, I checked out the operation on
IDL5.4 winnt WS4 SP5. Here I run the commands over and over,
and the mem is MEM USAGE from task manager, so the mem
is indeed given back to the OS.  In this case, i swap out  to
create the array, so there seems to be a little overhead when
you first do it, but there is no memory leaking on subsequent
allocations and freeings.
Note: the array is 190.7M (5000*5000*8bytes)


a  = 0, mem = 201440k
a = dblarr(5000,5000), mem = 397076k
a  = 0, mem = 201572k
a = dblarr(5000,5000), mem = 397076k
a  = 0, mem = 201572k


Cheers,
bob stockwell