Rectsoft OptimizeRAM (Sept 2002)

Old Software Archive

Ah, those days of struggling with limited RAM, especially when coding in Delphi or Turbo Pascal! Even with a modest upgrade to 2 sticks of 128MB RAM on the motherboard, I still encountered frequent hangs, especially when bombarding the code with large arrays and pointer allocations. Waiting for Windows to settle after a laggy few seconds was a real headache. It always puzzled me why the system suddenly sped up after such a delay. I noticed that when I didn’t heavily utilize arrays, WinXP didn’t lag at all. I downloaded software to clear my RAM, but why on earth was the behavior similar when I was running my codes?

That was my first observation-based hack. Without understanding the intricacies of heap, cache, and stack, I simply knew that clearing memory made my PC run faster. This led me to create a software program that did nothing but slowly loop through a huge array variable and set all of its elements to 0. The array had to be large enough to bypass WinXP RAM caches. Surprisingly, it worked like a charm. This software marked one of the first instances where I seriously considered commercial development.

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