From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: [RFC] RSS guarantees and limits References: From: "John Fremlin" Date: 22 Jun 2000 23:48:18 +0100 In-Reply-To: Rik van Riel's message of "Thu, 22 Jun 2000 18:37:58 -0300 (BRST)" Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: Stephen Tweedie , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: Rik van Riel writes: > Also, the memory space used by these small apps is usually > negligable compared to the memory used by the big program. > > What is 2% memory use for the big program can be the difference > between running and crawling for something like bash... I agree that this is usually true. But that is only because the big program actually isn't using the memory; in that case the memory should be freed anyway. If a big program were to actually use all its memory, then this system would destroy its performance, as all the getty's on the system and silly luser tweaks which aren't actually being used at all would take away useful memory. I booted up with mem=8M today, and found that even small things like bash were about 20% of system ram. By not letting a single big process (about the biggest that'd fit was emacs) get most all of the memory from the various junk that wasn't being used, the system would be completely unusable rather than merely a little slow. -- http://altern.org/vii -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/