Dan <dgadda@asu.edu> wrote:
> Is there a command to give back freed memory to the operating system?
> Any suggestions would be very helpful.

I have written memory managers which released unused memory to the O/S (Unix, Windows, OpenVMS), and hindsight tells me it probably wasn't worth the trouble. Here's the crucial question: What benefit do you expect to obtain by releasing the memory?

Observe that the amount of memory released must be sizable if it's to make a noticeable difference in the overall performance of the computer: the O/S will not fall all over itself with gratitude if you give up 8KB or so. The O/S will also not benefit much if it gets its megabytes back a mere few moments before the program terminates; ten megabyte-seconds is not a lot in the grand scheme of things.

So what does this imply about the nature of a program which can usefully release memory to the O/S? It has to be a program which runs in ``phases'' of some sort, where a phase which needs a lot of memory is followed by a phase which needs substantially less memory but runs for a significant amount of time. Such programs exist -- we can imagine, say, a program which manipulates a few 1000x1000 matrices to compute a single value needed by later phases, but doesn't need to keep the multi-megabyte matrices around after the initial computation finishes. In my experience (admittedly non-exhaustive), such programs are pretty rare -- not non-existent (I'm not trying to start a war of anecdotes here), but definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Keep in mind that allocated but unused memory is relatively cheap in a virtual memory O/S: if it's not referenced for a while it will migrate to backing store and just chew up some space on a disk somewhere, but it won't prevent the O/S and other programs from getting access to physical RAM. Unless you're starved for backing store this won't make much difference -- and if backing store is really scarce, you probably have other problems, too.

There is one noticeable advantage to releasing memory rather than retaining it in idleness: When you need it again, the O/S may be able to just supply you a bunch of freshly-zeroed pages rather than carefully retrieving megabytes of junk from the paging disk just so you can write all over them. Programs which can benefit from the ability to tell the O/S ``I no longer care about the data in this chunk of memory'' seem to be fairly common, but the benefit is seldom enormous -- if it is enormous, many systems have (non-portable, but useful) ways to help out, but not usually in the framework of a general-purpose allocator.

The bottom line: Releasing memory is usually not all that helpful, and in situations where it might be there are usually other concerns which would urge system-specific solutions anyhow. IMHO, YMMV, etc.

--
Eric Sosman