Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!news.cs.indiana.edu!msi.umn.edu!noc.MR.NET!gacvx2.gac.edu!gacvx2.gac.edu!scott Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: memory usage (was: (Ne)X(T) Terminals---a hot product idea? Message-ID: From: scott@mcs-server.gac.edu (Scott Hess) Date: 28 Apr 91 10:27:17 References: <1991Apr25.084827.1475@math.ucla.edu> <7e1G6bu.1@cs.psu.edu> Distribution: na Organization: Gustavus Adolphus College Nntp-Posting-Host: mcs-server.gac.edu In-reply-to: melling@cs.psu.edu's message of 28 Apr 91 10:41:54 GMTLines: 41 In article <7e1G6bu.1@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: In article scott@texnext.gac.edu (Scott Hess) writes: 8MB RAM is still going to be a plus. The main reason people should have 16M on a NeXT is because DPS takes up alot of RAM! Right now, I've not got much running on my NextStation (Stuart, Edit, Background, IconBounce), so there shouldn't be too many windows, right? The RSIZE of windowserver from ps aux reports 2.74M, the VSIZE 20.0M. So more RAM would be a plus. Besides, RAM is getting cheaper as we speak . . . The output of ps has to be wrong. Look at the values for csh on the NeXT. I agree that it is misleading, but I've found for processes using a lot of data, it's fairly good. Awhile back I was testing some new memory management routines for Stuart, and the basic idea was that they were supposed to use somwhere around 1/2 of the VM the old stuff used. I kept finding that the difference was more like 4/5 of the usage - but I knew that my overhead was less, and combining that with malloc overhead should make the win be greater (the new stuff doesn't use malloc in places the old did). Anyhow, what I found was that running Stuart and not generating any output left me with a VSIZE about 2x the size of the executable. I'm not really sure what to make of this - Stuart is a NextStep app, so I don't really have a lot of control over what the AppKit is doing with memory, but in this case it shouldn't be much - the menus, and a window should be fairly small. But, to get to the point, once I'd accounted for the apparently bloated starting size, the memory usage reported by VSIZE was almost exactly what I had expected. So, apparently VSIZE has at least some meaning in the real world! Later, -- scott hess scott@gac.edu Independent NeXT Developer GAC Undergrad "Simply press Control-right-Shift while click-dragging the mouse . . ." "I smoke the nose Lucifer . . . Banana, banana."