Re: excessive swap-in time

phil-news-nospam@xxxxxxxx wrote:

I doubt it will have much of an impact on the Firefox people. They will
just point fingers at each of the huge number of reusable toolkits their
beastly software uses ... toolkits that make huge uncoordicated data
structures that fragment the heap such that even when lots of windows
and web sites are closed, very few whole pages are released back to the
system. So when it needs to do anything, it still has a wide (in terms
of page count) footprint of data structures being scanned, and thus a
very large working set ... larger than if a fresh new instance were to
just go directly to all the web pages that are now open.


This is the reason why the Firefox people have refined their memory
use strategy and included for all platforms (*) a new memory allocator
(jemalloc) which is in fact the memory allocator of FreeBSD-7.0 and
is supposed to help releasing memory for unused pages and is also
more multiprocessor friendly (it uses several memory arenas so that
several threads can use independant locks on them).

(*) Windows, Linux, *BSD.



|> while it is well known and demonstrated that a system can very well
|> function fine and dandy with a constant stream of paging to swap.
|
| Believe it or not, but some (actually, quite a few) people are really
| old enough to personally remember the time when this was the general
| and not exceptional case.

If there is paging activity, there is some process waiting for it, unless
it is some kind of intelligent speculative activity.


Which is exactly the point of a good VM system.

--

Michel TALON

.

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