Resources not freed

[fergus]

I nicked the title from a recent post.

Some Cygwin sessions (specifically those using "find" or "diff", and 
when the task is very great, as in say "diff -rq /largedisk1 
/largedisk2"*) I find that hogged resources are not freed when Cygwin is 
exit-ed. The egg-timer churns away on rather simple Explore requests, 
and there's lots of disk-hunting. The system never seems to recover. 
Usually I re-boot.

* I do this a lot, being over-anxious about backup.

As far back as 2003 and as recently as 2006 there are posts about this, 
with references to virtual memory, swap memory and so on, not being 
freed. It seems to be a subtly difficult problem to describe, or perhaps 
it wears many guises.

1. Have I identified a real phenomenon or am I imagining it?

2. Can you characterise the class(es) of Cygwin activity most prone to 
cause this?

3. Is there anything to be done to improve matters (eg, increasing RAM 
from 512M to 1G or even 2G)?

Thank you.

Fergus

PS Is there a switch I can add to "find /" so that /proc is not traversed?

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