The Claim: Lockdown 2000 Uses Almost No Memory



Who Makes The Claim

Where It Was Said

  1. http://www.lockdown2000.com/Lockdown2000.html
  2. http://www.lockdown2000.com/manual.html
  3. http://www.lockdown2000.com/faxsheet.html
  4. http://www.lockdown2000.com/manual/index.html
  5. http://www.digital-dialog.no/lockdown2000/lockdown2000_features.html
  6. http://shop.flash.net/~dallaset/info.html

 

What Exactly Was Said

[1] Page titled "Lockdown 2000 - The Complete Fire Wall For Windows!": "Works as an idle program in the system tray and uses almost none of your computer's memory."

[2] Page titled "manual": "Works as an idle program and uses little to none of your computer's memory."

[3] Page titled "Reseller Fax Sheet": "Uses almost none of your computer's memory."

[4] Page titled "manual": "Works as an idle program and uses little to none of your computer's memory."

[5] Page titled "The Complete Fire Wall For Windows: LockDown 2000!": "Works as an idle program in the system tray and uses almost none of your computer's memory."

[6] Page titled "LockDown2000": "Uses almost none of your computer's memory."

 

What Is NOT Said

I was unable to find any explantions how a program which is nearly a megabyte in size can run with little to no memory.

 

Does Lockdown Use Almost No Memory?

I performed a test of Lockdown's memory usage, which utilized the Windows System Monitor. The test speaks for itself.

 

Conclusion

Of course Lockdown doesn't use "almost no memory."

 

Analysis

Running processes are always loaded into the system's memory.

The Lockdown v2.5.4 executable comprises an 800K file; like any other program, it occupies at least as much memory as is required to accomodate the program itself; but that's not all. It will cause Windows to load the numerous libraries it utilizes, as well as to set aside whatever additional memory Lockdown may need to store the data it accumulates and to perform its functions. Lockdown and its associated libraries and memory allocations may reside in the RAM memory itself, or the Windows virtual-memory swapfile, typically both; but in any case it requires very significant memory resources -- in my test, it consumed at least 5.4 megabytes. Because additional memory will be allocated as it operates, this is probably the bare minimum it will require.



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