Reclaiming (lots of) memory

[James Kew]

"Thomas Rast" <foo.bar at freesurf.ch.invalid> wrote in message 
news:87pt3y44la.fsf at thomas.local...
> Just to clear this up, the problem isn't that the process takes too
> much memory while initializing.  [...]
> The problem was that it wouldn't free *unused* RAM after
> initialization.

Is this really a problem though, if the process is long-running after 
initialisation? If the pages are unused after initialisation, won't they 
eventually get swapped out to disk making the physical RAM available 
elsewhere?

Or is this too simple a view?

James