[Python-Dev] Changing pymalloc behaviour for long running

[Luis P Caamano]

> "Martin v. L?wis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> 
> Evan Jones wrote:
> > Some posts to various lists [1] have stated that this is not a real
> > problem because virtual memory takes care of it. This is fair if you
> > are talking about a couple megabytes. In my case, I'm talking about
> > ~700 MB of wasted RAM, which is a problem.
> 
> This is not true. The RAM is not wasted. As you explain later, the
> pages will be swapped out to swap space, making the RAM available
> again for other tasks.
> 
> > First, this is wasting space
> > which could be used for disk cache, which would improve the performance
> > of my system.
> 
> And indeed, this is what the operating system does for you: free the
> memory (by swapping it out), then using the memory for disk cache, thus
> improving performance of your system.

Your statements above assume that swapping is OK but that's not
necessarily true.  Some of our daemons run on systems with no
swap or extremely slow swap.   Either way it's bad if the system has
to swap out 50-100 MBs of "unused" memory.  Now, that's a waste.

-- 
Luis P Caamano
Atlanta, GA USA