All of the physical RAM in the world doesn't mean a damned thing if you're a Win32 process limited to 2 GiB of user address space. Heap fragmentation is a very real problem there.

So don't run win32. :) We've had 64-bit processors for a while now, run a 64-bit OS and you have all the address space you might want.

LOL. Yesterday, I restarted firefox because it ate 13GB of virtual memory and started to get really unusable.

And even on 64-bit Windows, 32-bit Firefox will get the full 4 GB of address space.

On machines where I have at least 4G of ram, I configure them to not use any swap space at all.

If a process needs (or pretends to need) that much memory, the swapping will just kill the performance, and the machine gets unresponsive. I rather have the OOM killer do its job, have a few processes dying and be able to continue using the machine.

I do the same on a Netbook with 2G of RAM. It gets a little hairy sometimes so I always need to keep an eye on Process Explorer, but the performance boost is huge.

As far as I'm aware, there's no other method to disable the default Windows behaviour of swapping out programs even when sufficient RAM is available.

Doesnt matter how much youve got if usage continues to grow unchecked.

...and programmer time costs much more. So yes, normally that's a great attitude.

But still, the app has to run on real machines today. So its worth a "sweeping up" pass before release, to fix gross oversight and bugs that leak/use CPU egregiously.