Speeding up exit(2)?

[Wojciech Puchar]

>> it swapped a lot, then wrote "end" and immediately exited.
>
> Hmmm... yes, it's strange. With malloc-ed space, exit is also very
> fast. On a 2 GB machine with amd64, exit is almost immediate:

try mallocing 2 million times 2 kilobytes and fill.

maybe exit first free all malloc'ed space which is definitely nonsense.

>
> If I find a way to isolate the problem, I'll post it here.

maybe your problematic program uses atexit and exit actually calls part of 
it?