From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Oct  4  9: 4: 2 2001
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Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 18:03:56 +0200
From: Guido van Rooij <guido@gvr.org>
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: grep memory footage
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When fgrepping a huge file (say 10GB) for a non-existing string,
fgrep's memory size skyrockets. At a certain point in time its SIZE was 391M
(RSS was about 30MB) and the system got rather unreponsive. The
string was about 12 bytes big, and we fail to see why grep would
need so much.

Is there a good explanation for this?

-Guido

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