[Vm-dev] Re: [squeak-dev] What is meant by 'shrink' in the VM
parameters?
John M McIntosh
johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Fri Oct 22 16:23:11 UTC 2010
It *would* give the memory back to the operating system.
But we don't anymore again read the following
/* Note:
*
* The code allows memory to be overallocated; i.e., the initial
* block is reserved via mmap() and then the unused portion
* munmap()ped from the top end. This is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS since
* malloc() may randomly map new memory in the block we "reserved"
* and subsequently unmap()ped. Enabling this causes crashes in
* Croquet, which makes heavy use of the FFI and thus calls malloc()
* all over the place.
*
* For this reason, overallocateMemory is DISABLED by default.
*
* The upshot of all this is that Squeak will claim (and hold on to)
* ALL of the available virtual memory (or at least 75% of it) when
* it starts up. If you can't live with that, use the -memory
* option to allocate a fixed size heap.
*/
On 2010-10-22, at 6:24 AM, Ken Causey wrote:
> I'm wondering what 'shrink' means in the following VM parameter
> comments:
>
> "24 memory threshold above which shrinking object memory (rw)"
>
> and
>
> "32 number of shrink memory requests (read-only)"
>
> My first thought is that a shrink represents Squeak release memory back
> to the operating system once it is no longer needed.
>
> As I've mentioned before we are trying to reduce the RAM footprint of
> the www.squeak.org process and are watching various related figures.
>
> We can see the value in VM parameter 32 increase, but while the value
> for parameter 3 (end of memory) goes down as you would expect, the
> operating system's view of the memory usage does not change.
>
> Ken
>
--
===========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> Twitter: squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
===========================================================================
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