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List:       licq-main
Subject:    Re: [Licq-main] memory usage
From:       "Dirk A . Mueller" <mueller () kde ! org>
Date:       2000-05-11 12:18:06
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On Don, 11 Mai 2000, Cantanker wrote:

> > As this value is useless, kernel 2.4 does not calculcate it any more. 
> I'm using 2.3.99 at the mo' ... wouldn't that be the same?

Well, I don't know how the current status about that point is. I'm still
running 2.2.15. However I've been told several times already that there has
been a proc cleanup for 2.4. 

Maybe it's only enabled for bigmem kernels. The problem is that the costs
for calculating this value is extremly high while it's informative character
is almost zero. So these days Linux machines spend a lot of time calculating
stuff that is uninteressting. Big Linux servers i.e. are freezing completely
for a few milliseconds each time a program like top refreshes
it's display. That's unacceptable, and I've been told that it has 
finally been taken care of (Finally because the problem is known for
several years already).  

In addition it takes care of those beginners who flood newsgruops with
messages like "OH MY GOD! MY X SERVER TAKES UP 80MB OF RAM ALTHOUGH I ONLY
HAVE 64MB BUILT IN!". That's just another prove that the mapped address
space of a process is boring as long as it doesn't correlate with the
actual physical RAM involved. 


Dirk

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