ten thousand small processes
Sean Chittenden
sean at chittenden.org
Mon Jun 30 16:33:54 PDT 2003
> > Instead of complaining about wasting 78 megabytes and arguing
> > about why various proposed solutions fall short and why your way
> > is the best, why don't you come up with a patch that saves space
> > for small programs?
>
> Funny. Seems to me that I keep making concrete
> suggestions---including a detailed proposal for giving more space to
> malloc()---and the answer is consistently ``We really don't care
> about per-process overhead.'' What's the benefit of a patch for
> people who don't even see the problem?
It'd be slick if malloc(3) had a mallopt(3) call that'd make it easier
to monkey with the _malloc_options, but, until such time as phk is on
this list or decides to add such an interface, why not just set:
_malloc_options = "<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<"; /* '<' * 15 */
to reduce the malloc cache to 0? From malloc(3):
TUNING
Once, when the first call is made to one of these memory allocation rou-
tines, various flags will be set or reset, which affect the workings of
this allocation implementation.
The ``name'' of the file referenced by the symbolic link named
/etc/malloc.conf, the value of the environment variable MALLOC_OPTIONS,
and the string pointed to by the global variable _malloc_options will be
interpreted, in that order, character by character as flags.
Most flags are single letters, where uppercase indicates that the behav-
ior is set, or on, and lowercase means that the behavior is not set, or
off.
[snip]
< Reduce the size of the cache by a factor of two. The default
cache size is 16 pages. This option can be specified multiple
times.
-sc
--
Sean Chittenden
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