Prime lags after extensive processing

[Tim Wessman]

(03-13-2015 08:03 PM)bobkrohn Wrote:  I didn't know you could "wear out" RAM.

I said "thrash" not wear out. Basically, think of it as your computer's disk getting very fragmented and the storage has tons of small little empty holes, but not enough large ones. So when you ask it for something large the underlying operating system has to move stuff around (if possible) to make enough space to give you the memory. On full operating systems like windows, you having things like "virtual memory" where it can write out stuff to disk when not in use, and bring it back later. This is not usually ever done for systems with small memory/slow speed however as it just isn't really practical or sometimes even possible.

This is why rebooting makes it speed up again.

Basically, your programs from what I can gather are constantly making and creating many fairly large RAM objects. For example, recalling a note will make a complete copy of that note in a string object to be edited. Then when you store it back it makes another block of memory to store into the internal memory location, and then it will delete the first one.

Now if you've found some sort of a memory bug that messes up some internal data (which I suspect you have) - and that messed up information gets written to disk - it is entirely possible that things are getting saved in that messed up state and causing you problems later. That can cause all sort of unpredictable behavior.