From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Aug 31 22:10:15 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id WAA07033 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 31 Aug 1997 22:10:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dyson.iquest.net (dyson.iquest.net [198.70.144.127]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA07028 for ; Sun, 31 Aug 1997 22:10:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from root@localhost) by dyson.iquest.net (8.8.6/8.8.5) id AAA04960; Mon, 1 Sep 1997 00:09:32 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" Message-Id: <199709010509.AAA04960@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Re: Netscape Communicator 4.02b7 In-Reply-To: <199709010410.NAA00659@word.smith.net.au> from Mike Smith at "Sep 1, 97 01:40:18 pm" To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Date: Mon, 1 Sep 1997 00:09:32 -0500 (EST) Cc: benedict@echonyc.com, peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL31 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Mike Smith said: > > On Sun, 31 Aug 1997, Peter Korsten wrote: > > > > > 'Top' shows that Netscape takes some 13 Mb Mb memory (YIKES!). > > > > That's not counting the 9 MB taken up by its "DNS helper". > > Communicator forks to create the DNS helper process (a great idea, > IMHO), so all you're seeing there is a second copy of the text; it's > shared with the original copy, so it's not actually using any more > memory. > Just to follow up, note that it is difficult to judge how much memory is being used by a process due to just what you are saying. Something with a fork() type inheritance can very effectively share memory. Sharing is also very effective when running processes from the same executable. The major overhead in creation of a new process (fork) with such a large address space, are the page table pages (only a few of 'em.) -- John dyson@freebsd.org jdyson@nc.com