Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 22:01:46 +0000 (GMT) From: Rob Hartill <robh@imdb.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: server death when swap space is all gone. Message-ID: <199610282201.WAA10772>
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John Dyson wrote: > >(The "humor" in this message is not directed to the original poster, but > perhaps is slightly misguided Linux oriented friend :-)). > >> >> On a related note, a Linux using friend takes pleasure in telling me >> that FreeBSD is brian-dead w.r.t memory management because it can't diff >> a couple of 20Mb files on a machine with ample memory and swap (combined). >> >Didn't know that diff used mmap? Linux is brain-dead because it doesn't >push unused pages out to swapspace, until memory needs to be freed. :-). >You know that it is faster to free up the memory, thereby letting the >system utilize the ram, as opposed to tying it up with stuff that should >be on swap? :-). Many of the complaints are due to people not >understanding this bit of info (or perhaps Linux fervor)... I know linux is crap, but the simple fact is my 96Mb FreeBSD machine with 77Mb of swap, doing nothing but "diff" on two files falls over with "diff: memory exhausted", while a 48mb linux machine with ? swap can produce the 700k diff file. When I run diff, "top" shows no evidence that the swap is being used or that 'cache' memory being reclaimed. The process grows to 33Mb then reports "diff: memory exhausted". I think we tried this once on a FreeBSD machine with far more swap and it failed there too. Why does the FreeBSD's superior memory management let me down ? -- Rob Hartill (robh@imdb.com) http://www.imdb.com/ ... why wait for a clear night to see the stars?.
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