Steve asked...
>OK, I'll ask the stupid question: why does the Memory Manager ever
>need to "scan all physical memory to find available pages"? This is
>the memory *Manager*, right? As in, the guy who owns the memory? The
>one who controls it, services allocation requests, and otherwise
>determines who gets what where and when? If that's the case, should we
>be concerned that the "Memory Manager" has no idea where its memory
>has gone? Inquiring minds want to know!

As far as I understand, this *manager* is happy as long as people
return memory they no longer use (either by making the pages "free"
or "recoverable overlay candidates"). If the processes on the system
do not return sufficient memory pages for "reuse", the memory manager
starts the scanning operation to find out, which pages have been used
recently and which not.

So it does keep track of "who owns which pages", but it has to spend
some effort to find out which pages have not been accessed for a while
and are thus prefered candidates to be "swapped out" when more demand
for memory arizes.

Hope this clarifies a bit (or two). Corrections welcome (as always).

Lars.

(I'm surprised to "defend" a manager... but it's the memory manager ;-)