I think most computing environments do have a user of, if you consider a "user" to be something that be notified and can act on such notifications (e.g. to clos

I think most computing environments do have a user of, if you consider a "user" to be something that be notified and can act on such notifications (e.g. to close applications). Your music software's problem seems to be a bad algorithm - not that it doesn't check the return values of the `*alloc` functions.Aas you say, it should be able to process the audio in constant space. While I assume that I can always acquire memory, I do still care about the space-efficiency of my software. I must admit I've never seen my system depending on swap, so I don't know how bad it is. But, if you have 1GB of on-RAM memory already allocated, wouldn't it only be new processes that are slow? Also, I'd again point out that if you don't like swap, you don't have to have one.