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Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 14:13:22 +0100
From: Ed Schouten <ed@fxq.nl>
To: Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
Message-ID: <20080203131322.GK1179@hoeg.nl>
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Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: sort(1) memory usage
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* Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav <des@des.no> wrote:
> I've been trying to figure out why some periodic scripts consume so much
> memory.  I've narrowed it down to sort(1).
>=20
> At first, I thought the scripts were using it inefficiently, feeding it
> more data than was really needed.  Then I discovered this:
>=20
> des@ds4 ~% (sleep 10 | sort) & (sleep 5 ; top -o res | grep sort)
> [1] 66024
> 66024 des          1  -8    5 54796K 52680K piperd 1   0:00  0.88% sort
>=20
> That's right - sort(1) consumes 50+ MB of memory doing *nothing*.
>=20
> (roughly half that on a 32-bit box)
>=20
> Something is rotten in the state of GNU...

On my i386 box it spends 27M, but when I replace `sort' with `sed',
without any arguments, it's only 1.4 MB. I tried this on RELENG_6. I can
also reproduce this on Linux.

--=20
 Ed Schouten <ed@fxq.nl>
 WWW: http://g-rave.nl/

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