Ok whenever I run any application in wine the application seems very slow and only uses about 30mb of memory wine config only allows for basic setup where can I edit wine to use more memory?

I use Cedega and it always seems to swap. I've got plenty of RAM and it's never used, I know cause I run games in windows and make sure conky is always visible to monitor everything

I'd be interested to see if there is a cool answer to this

I believe wine overrides the its loader section and does not use glibc's in order to map memory the windows way.
Maybe the memory usage report gets confused by this.
How do you monitor memory usage? Is it the free or ps command?
Are you using a modified kernel with 4G VM split patch from Ingo Molnar?

Are you sure that it uses 30 MB of memory. You have to be careful reading the information from ps or top. The utility pmap is a better program to figure out how much memory the program is using.

The reason why WINE runs Windows programs slow is because it is an software emulator. It is trying to emulate Windows. Doing this takes processor time. WINE will run faster with multiple processors but I do not know if it is threaded. Windows programs has memory leaks, so over time it will eat all the memory in your system.

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Wine is not an emulator. It implements (or tries) windows API. Emulation involves changing or translating one set of binary commands into another. That's not what wine does. Just look at the code. It's obvious. In fact if it were an emulator, you would need windows installed.

Anyway, I'm not sure about the memory question but here is a bit of healthy reading http://www.winehq.com/site/docs/winedev-guide/x2860

Thanks for that link jlo_sandog, nice read

Wrong, WINE is an emulator. What you are thinking is a hardware emulator which most people think of first. There are two kinds of emulators. One is a software emulator and the other is an hardware emulator. A software emulator have to translate the commands like Windows API to X11 that WINE does for GUI. A hardware emulator simulates a whole complete computer in software although an hardware emulator should not be confused with virtual machines. Actually WINE is an emulator. It is just emulating software not hardware.

Electro: Guess you haven't looked at the Wine website, ever. Check myth number one here

Actually I was wrong it had nothing to do with the system memory it had to do with my video card I tried "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/legacy_va_layout" as root and it seemed to speed things up quite a bit. My problem was in half life 2 and it at first looked like it may have been memory related but it was right on http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/...p?articleid=60
the whole time I skipped over it though because it said for the nVidia 1.0-6629 driver and mine is the the 1.0-8178

I already read that a few years ago. People still think emulators simulate hardware which is another type of emulator. WINE simulates Windows so it is still a software emulator. WINE developers states an emulator as software simulating hardware or a machine. They do not mention a software emulator correctly. A software emulator can also be called a wrapper. For example, you will need a Video for Windows to Direct Show wrapper to use video capture cards with VirtualDub. The performance will be slower and errors will show up as bugs. A software emulator have to count for infinite variables that the software creates. Of course performance of an software emulator can be improve but it will not reach up to 100%. Another example is running Starcraft with WINE and trying to use Battlenet console shows the amount of variables that software emulators have to count for. Battlenet console never gets refresh unless you enter into a game. I rather stick with Virtual Machines such as VMware. Virtual machines maybe slower but they are much more reliable.

With all respect, I believe you are wrong. WINE performance can be higher than 100% in some specific cases because WINE does not "wraps", it implements. WINE overrides high level APIs like the elf loader and calls low level APIs on the host system. It is slower than windows most of the time because the windows API is badly designed and hard to implement because not fully understood. In some specific cases, the WINE implementation of the API is faster than the windows one though.

I need QT to run KDE apps so maybe it's an 'emulator' too