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Date:      Wed, 9 Dec 2009 09:07:33 -0500
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Cc:        Linda Messerschmidt <linda.messerschmidt@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: Superpages on amd64 FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE
Message-ID:  <200912090907.33433.jhb@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <237c27100911260714x2fcb194ew1e6ce11e764efd08@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <237c27100911260714x2fcb194ew1e6ce11e764efd08@mail.gmail.com>

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On Thursday 26 November 2009 10:14:20 am Linda Messerschmidt wrote:
> It's not clear to me if this might be a problem with the superpages
> implementation, or if squid does something particularly horrible to
> its memory when it forks to cause this, but I wanted to ask about it
> on the list in case somebody who understands it better might know
> whats going on. :-)

I talked with Alan Cox some about this off-list and there is a case that can 
cause this behavior if the parent squid process takes write faults on a 
superpage before the child process has called exec() then it can result in 
superpages being fragmented and never reassembled.  Using vfork() should 
prevent this from happening.  It is a known issue, but it will probably be 
some time before it is addressed.  There is lower hanging fruit in other areas 
in the VM that will probably be worked on first.

-- 
John Baldwin



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