why does a program/game slow down or cap out on resource allocation well before the computer is out of resources?
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That depends on the kind of resources you’re talking about. I’m guessing you’re thinking of apps running out of memory. That happens because the OS tries to be clever.
If there’s not enough RAM for all the memory needed by all the running applications then some of the memory gets dumped out to the pagefile on the disk. This frees up RAM for apps which need it more urgently, but it’s a fairly slow process. So if your game asks for a bunch of memory and the OS decides it needs to evict some *other* data to free up RAM for you, your game will slow down while that is being done.
This is also a warning flag that we might run out of memory soonish, so it might precede the game aborting completely, as you’ve seen.
Ideally, the OS picks data to evict which hasn’t been used in a long time, but of course the more memory your game asks for, the more aggressive the OS has to be in finding stuff to kick out. Eventually the OS might start dumping data that your game needed quite recently (and will need soon again), which becomes a vicious cycle where the data you need is constantly being swapped in and out of memory, slowing everything to a grind.
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