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I have a strange phenomenon. I'm starting a long-running process on Windows cmd shell (the behaviour is the same on XP and Win7). The process reads information from the file system (files, directory structure, etc.), and stores it in process memory, and then answers requests from other processes. When I terminate the process with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-Break, and re-start it, the file system information is immediately available to the process, and it doesn't have to re-read it from disk. It seems like the old process was only being swapped out, and is now swapped in again. - How is this possible? Is there a way to assure the old process memory is gone?

INVALID:

I was misinterpreting my app's behaviour, and was looking in the wrong places. Information was actually passed through (other) files between invocations.- Sorry for the noise.

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closed as too localized by DMA57361♦ Jun 29 '11 at 14:20

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The fact that Windows NT has a file cache, from which files and directories can be re-read without needing to access the disc, shouldn't be that strange, let alone a problem. ☺

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Sure, but in that case my app would still think it is reading from the FS, whether the OS is physically going to disk or not. But the process finds the information immediately in memory, so doesn't even try to do file i/o. – ThomasH Jun 29 '11 at 13:54
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