Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hpfcso!stroyan From: stroyan@hpfcso.HP.COM (Mike Stroyan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: what is my swap used for ? Message-ID: <7370132@hpfcso.HP.COM> Date: 4 May 90 22:43:03 GMT References: Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA Lines: 14 > To get an inside view of the Kernel I patched the BSD 4.3 'pstat' to work > on the HP9000/835. I got reasonable values out of 'pstat -s', showing > that after a program allocated all memory it could get, there were > about 10 MB of 'free' swap. I made a further test, starting several > instances of this program. Each of them was able to gather a small > additional piece of memory, until the remaining 10 MB were completely > used. You may want to debug that program and see how much memory malloc is trying to sbrk(). I have heard that malloc asks for memory in larger and larger chunks, proportional to the amount of memory it has already allocated. That last 20 byte malloc might be asking sbrk() for 16M. Mike Stroyan, stroyan@hpfcla.hp.com