I want to talk a bit about page files. Very sexy.

Ready? You have a computer. It has RAM, which is fast, expensive, and limited. RAM is important or everything that runs in the “here-and-now” on your computer… the browser you’re reading this on, iTunes playing a song, that open Word doc that you’re not working on but is still stilling there waiting for you to focus on it. It also has a hard drive, which is is big, cheap and slow. You hard drive is long-term potential, documents you aren’t using right now, songs you aren’t listening to. High quality RAM can be as high as $50 per gig, while even the fastest hard drive will come in around $1 per gig. You need both to have a computer, and the relationship between the two is quite complicated.

Stay with me. Because RAM is so expensive, yet so critical, you can never have enough. Literally never. So, to make a computer run decently, one of the most important things that an Operating System does is manage the relationship between RAM and hard drive in a little game called Virtual Memory. You can really get a system humming along nicely this way: important and immediate things you are doing use RAM right now, but operations that aren’t immediately pressing get pushed off onto the hard drive. Then, when needed, the less pressing operations get cleared out from RAM and the stuff from the hard drive is swapped back to RAM to work on in the here-and-now.

There is a speed and space penalty for using your hard drive this way, since you have to reserve space on your drive that you can no longer use for storing files, and the hard drive is orders of magnitude slower than your RAM. 99% of the time, that penalty is worth it, you don’t really notice the speed hit, and it increases your potential to do stuff. Win-win.

Some folks are hardcore. I’ve got a machine that’s sole purpose is to be an amazing graphics/video/animation box. The RAM cost as much as the rest of the computer combined, and the system is tweaked to pretty much never use any virtual memory, ever. This would suck for lots of other uses, but for this, it’s amazing.

Now, imagine for a moment that I’m a putz. (/me puts on putz hat).

Hurr hurr, hey, if RAM’s so expensive, I’ll build a system that has as little RAM as possible.

*BONG*Windows-Respectfully-Suggests-You-Don’t-Do-That*BONG*

Hurr, hey! I can manually set how much virtual memory there is! I’ll give myself more RAM for FREE!!!

*BONG*Seriously-that-won’t-work-for-long*BONG*

HURRR. Dude, I’ll tweak it so that it only has 256MB of RAM, but uses 100GB of virtual memory! It’s like I’m printing money!!! HURRRHURRRGASM!!!

*BONGBONG*You-can’t-push-the-system-that-fa{#`%${%&`+’${`%&NO CARRIER”)***BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.***

Here’s the punchline. Go up and replace “RAM” with “cash,” replace “hard drive” with “credit,” and replace “Operating System” with “Financial System.” “Virtual Memory” is the money management that when used responsibly can make a system truly efficient, but when trifled with by someone who is only interested in the short term gain can bring the whole system down.

Carrying the analogy a bit too far. One of the things I like about Windows and Linux is that I can build a machine and take individual control of these settings and make it work exactly how I want. If I blow it, however, it’s all on me. And if I am in control of a lab or a network and I bring the whole thing down because of my lack of understanding, I should be relieved from duty.

One of the things I like about Macs is that it manages virtual memory pretty much automatically. It’s more expensive and you only have one source to buy from, but you’re paying for the safety factor. It’s hard as hell to tweak these settings, and it’s probably not worth it because even if you get more performance, you will probably screw something else up.

Windows is my analogy for the quasi-unregulated system we’ve had. Tons of potential, placed in the wrong hands, driven to a big BSoD. Macs are the coming regulation. Less freedom? Maybe. A little too much power by one central company? Maybe. Better than boiling our boots for soup and leaving the old morons in charge? Definitely.

Tagged: , economics