memory leak in free()

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 14 June 2006 13:53, Paul Allen wrote:
> From Jason Evans <jasone at freebsd.org>, Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 
10:35:03AM -0700:
> > This is on a 32-bit system, right?  If so, what's happening is that the 
> > brk-managed space (data segment) is being fragmented, such that the 
> > address space isn't returned to the OS.  However, this is not really a 
> > memory leak, since madvise() is called in order to let the kernel know 
> > that the unused space need not be swapped out.
> 
> And in particular this should manifest itself as 'RES' declining but 'SIZE'
> in top remaining unchanged.  Until an over-commit hating individual manages
> to get a patch into the tree, this should not be a concern at all.

And any such patch would have to have a knob that defaulted to keeping
overcommit on anyway. :-)

-- 
John Baldwin