Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 12:30:55 -0700 (MST) From: Jeremy Chatfield <jdc@crab.xinside.com> To: nate@sneezy.sri.com Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Two proposals Message-ID: <199504011930.MAA14503@crab.xinside.com> In-Reply-To: <199504011746.KAA19377@trout.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at Apr 1, 95 10:46:00 am
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Nate Williams writes:
>
> > 2) Malloc
> >
> > I installed few days ago Netscape-1.1b. It is a nice program, but
> > quite memory hungry and makes your X-server fat, too.
> >
> > I relinked my X-server (XFree86-3.1.1) with gnumalloc and its memory
> > usage (VSZ) dropped from 7MB to 4MB! It seems, that the standard
> > FreeBSD malloc wastes memory quite liberally. The VM-system probably
> > can reclaim some (most?) of those wasted pages, but not all.
>
> Correct, the default BSD malloc library is a pig. However, back in the
> 1.1.5 days I brought in a new version of malloc() by Mark Moraes which
> was going to replace the default version. However, due to some
> employment problems that occurred during the 1.X -> 2.0 transition I
> wasn't able to do the work, so that malloc version got lost.
>
> And, there were occasional stories of strange core-dumps that were
> caused by that version which would go away if the old version or the GNU
> version were used. However, I'm not completely convinced that the
> Moraes malloc was the cause of them. I think it may have triggered a
> VM bug that the others didn't.
There are some cheesy hacks in the X Consortium code, that can cause
segmentation violation, when using mallocs with garbage collection.
We wrote our own malloc, to observe some implicit rules about how X
Servers use memory... We use SVR3, SVR4, SVR4.2, SVR4.2MP, Solaris,
Linux, FreeBSD and BSD/OS implementations, and none had a malloc with
the required characteristics, nor did any of the versions whose
sources were available to us.
If reliability is significant, then you should keep this in mind. If
size is important, then ignore me ;-) We'll have a demo version of
our Server available soon (restricted by number of clients), so you
can do some (black box) comparisons.
Cheers, JeremyC.
--
Jeremy Chatfield, +1(303)470-5302, FAX:+1(303)470-5513, email:jdc@xinside.com
X Inside Inc, P O Box 10774, Golden, CO 80401-0610, USA.
Commercial X Server - for more information please try these services
http://www.xinside.com info@xinside.com ftp.xinside.com
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