using system monitor (the one that can be optionally installed with windows 95) to experiment with how certain games use memory on a 64mb RAM pentium system, i've observed the following:

with age of empires 2, allocated memory can grow up to 180mb, with swapfile size up to 50mb. swapfile in use seems to stay at zero for smaller maps but grows to about 5mb for a large map. free memory then gets close to zero and there's moderate but constant page-ins (20-40); page-out sees intermittent spikes to 20-30 on the graph. vcache, which is limited to 4mb via ini, stays at about 2.4mb.

with starcraft, memory usage is rather different: allocated memory is about 42mb, which roughly matches up with the shown free memory of almost 24mb; swapfile size/use is both zero, but conversely, there is a high constant amount of page-ins going on at ~126 on the graph, with no page-outs. vcache runs at close to 4mb here.

what is the reason for the hdd thrashing when the swap file apparently isn't being used at all when running starcraft? i did once read about prepaging during idle time for "performance optimization", but it seems strange to do this when running a heavy application, particularily if the system had PIO, so these operations would presumably waste even more CPU time.