On 07/14/2010 01:34 PM, Todd Denniston wrote: > > Did your test program actually USE the 100 megs of ram? > Because of "lazy allocation" or "optimistic memory allocation"*** as done by the kernel, "over-commit" is the term you were looking for. > the memory > is not actually consumed until used. When I did something similar, I simply wrote a char to each > byte of memory(there are faster ways, but I wanted simple not fast) I'm pretty sure you just need to write one byte to each page. (write one byte, move the counter by getpagesize()).