Originally posted by s0nIc
ok a little hint boys and girls... long story short

as long as you meet or better yet exceed the hardware requirements of the O/S.. you are less likely to come accross crashing it..

if i install win2k on a puter wid 64MB RAM.. heck surely it will crash coz the minimum requirement of it is 128MB RAM...

but since i added 128MB more which would give me a total of 128 + 64 = 192MB RAM.. it has never crashed since..
this is not exactly true the OS should just run like a DOG
eg i have a 486sx/25 with 16MB of ram and
bind on it using 20MB of ram thing runs fine
it swaps a bit but it still does not have too much latency for
doing dns lookups.

if a OS crashes when it runs out of RAM its a bug and makes it relitivly easy to DOS it (try tail /dev/zero)

but only will it really start crewing up is when you really exceed the require ments and the OS spends the whole time swapping ram and never actually getting anything done.

eg 16MB ram and 200MB used

process 1 loads lots of pages back from swap
process 2 does the same
process 3 same
..
process 15 same but requires process 1's ram so they get swapped out again and just keep repeating.

but there are some nice patches to prevent this but it would not work well in an X enviroment. it does this by suspending and swapping all of a process out process out until other finish what they are doing or loads more ram becomes avilable.