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memory leak on solaris 2.5.1

Wolfgang Grafen Wolfgang.Grafen at marconicomms.com
Wed May 31 12:49:33 EDT 2000 
William Annis wrote:

> akuchlin at mems-exchange.org (Andrew M. Kuchling) writes:
>
> > Wolfgang Grafen <Wolfgang.Grafen at marconicomms.com> writes:
> > > >>> x = "1001" * 5000000
> > > will occupy about 22 MB.
> > > >>> del x
> > > doesn't decrease the amount of allocated Memory.
> > >
> > > With Suse-Linux the memory will be properly freed on a Intel PC and
> > > a pre-compiled Python 1.5.2 version.
> >
> > This is probably because of the different malloc() implementations on
> > the two platforms.  When the request is for a large area of memory,
> > Linux malloc() will use mmap() to allocate it for just this reason; on
> > freeing the memory the process size will shrink when the memory region
> > is unmapped.  Solaris malloc() probably doesn't do this; this theory
> > could be confirmed,
>
>         Right.  Solaris assumes that if you ask for a chunk of memory,
> you are probably going to ask for it again later, even after a free().

What is it for? After consuming the fast silicon main memory the
process slows extremely down when swapping to disk although
it could demand freed memory!

Wolfgang
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