Date: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 21:59:51 -0700 (PDT) From: John Dyson <dyson> To: archie@tribe.com (Archie Cobbs) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 2.0.5 Eager to go into swap Message-ID: <199508040459.VAA18649@freefall.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: <199508040425.VAA06637@bubba.tribe.com> from "Archie Cobbs" at Aug 3, 95 09:25:14 pm
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> > > Here's my own 1.5 cents data point on this memory hogging issue. > > I've used Linux a lot and now I'm starting to use FreeBSD a lot, and I can > tell you the difference in memory usage is very noticable to me. > > I'm running the Mach64 server (albeit at 1280x1024) and right now it's > using 19 Megs according to the VSIZE of "ps"... that's huge! > The FreeBSD Berkeley malloc uses the buddy system. That is not VM space efficient!!! > I have 16 M of on-board RAM plus 41 M of swap, and I still run out > of memory. That's ridiculous considering that I don't really do very > much... :-) On Linux I almost never run out, and that's with only > 16 M of RAM and 32 M of swap. > Gnumalloc is better in many regards, alot worse in others. It is probably a better fit for X. > > Maybe that's why nobody wants to deal with this issue--it collapses into a > > flame war and nobody can do anything about it anyway! > > Hmmm.. bad attitude! If Linux can do it right, then so can FreeBSD... > or at least there is evidence that maybe FreeBSD can do it better. > > What if we ported Linux's libraries? Would that help? How hard would > it be to replace the existing malloc() with GNU malloc()? What's up > with the X server? Is that all because of malloc()? Yow. > > On a related note, does the kernel ever promise more memory than it > can actually deliver? Or do all calls to malloc() reserve swap (at least)? > In either case, is this behavior configurable? Swap is NOT preallocated. I had some customers that used SVR4 in a fault tolerant application, and swap preallocation actually decrease reliability!!! (Due to Shared lib startup problems on malloc failure). John dyson@root.com
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