What can happen if you forget to deallocate memory?

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Originally Posted by Cactus_Hugger

Depends completely on the computer, OS, and what's in the system at the time.
What if the page file is full? (or non-existant?) Granted, in Windows, the page file seems to be unbounded in limit (probably a tweak somewhere I don't know, but my pagefile seems to be 4GB at the moment...) Now, my Linux box, the swap will not grow to infinity - there's are hard limit at ~1.5GB, RAM + swap combined. Less if I turn swap off. The man pages state this:

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True. OS dependant. But it would show that every OS does not behave the same, so in sense, the original statement that it would starve all other applications is untrue.

Hmm, that issue is kind of lame.

I have been running Linux on my computer with 2GB ram without any swap for quite a few months and no problems so far =).

No swap at all? Why?
I have a 1GB swap partition on mine and according to gkrellm it barely gets used but still, why not swap?

I used to have a swap partition, but I have never seen it used at all, so I thought I don't need it =). I have a ram usage monitor on my gnome desktop and I have never seen the ram usage go above 1GB (disk cache doesn't count), except when I run something I write that leaks memory like crazy =). It makes my partition table simpler.