Memory, swap, and limits

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 09:50:37 -0700,
  Rick Stevens <ricks at nerd.com> wrote:
>
> If your RAM is heavily fragmented or heavily used, the system may find
> it difficult to locate adequate contiguous RAM and spend a lot of time
> swapping things to disk and back as tasks compete for the free RAM.

For most things the memory only needs to be contiguous in the virtual
address space. Real memory is allocated in pages and for most things
they don't need to be allocated contiguously.