Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 12:30:54 +0100 (BST) From: Paul Richards <paul@netcraft.co.uk> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: paul@FreeBSD.org, imp@village.org, rsnow@legend.txdirect.net, FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: XFree86 and swap Message-ID: <199507171130.MAA24214@server.netcraft.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <199507171129.UAA03075@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Jul 17, 95 08:59:01 pm
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In reply to Michael Smith who said > > > When you're running lots of X clients, like netsape and xv then you're > > going to use a LOT of memory in one go and if the X server never gives it > > back you're in trouble. > > No; the process can reuse the space, it's just that under our current > malloc, the memory is never returned to the system. But that's a major problem now. I guess before the days of X you never had this problem. Databases perhaps would have run permanently and accumulated memory over time but in those situations it would be more efficient to let the process keep the memory. X servers are a different, short lived clients like netscape can consume vast amounts of memory and the X server ends up owning all the systems memory, even if it spends most of its time idle. I've been running into problems. I've got a 16Mb box with 64Mb of swap. I use xdm so the server runs permanently. Every few days I have to kill X so it frees it memory because it ends up with ALL of it. I've had cron jobs die over night because of a lack of memory which isn't good at all. Sounds like the XFree86 folks are trying to address this problem in their server but it's probably time for someone to address the general malloc problem. -- Paul Richards, Bluebird Computer Systems. FreeBSD core team member. Internet: paul@FreeBSD.org, http://www.freebsd.org/~paul Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 1222 457651 (home)
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