How does The Merge System, RAM and Caching/Paging? operate?

[mikeslr]

Hi All,

Hopefully Devs and experienced users with technical understanding will take the time to read through and answer questions asked in this post. I've asked them only in part because of personal curiosity. I came to Puppy Linux about 5 years ago knowing almost nothing. Since then, I've learned a lot. But recently, in trying to provide some advice to a new member as a result of an experiment I just conducted I realized that I didn't really know some of the fundamentals by which Puppy operates: that I had been making assumptions. Worse, in trying to utilize a “Well-Minded Search