mfriedel@slate.mines.colorado.edu (Friedel Michael) (04/17/91)
In my last post I wasn't completely clear on what I actually ment. I did know about the low-water mark, I wasn't aware that vm_stat only accounts for the real_memory. Does anyone know of a way to get a statistic on the swap file, i.e how many pages are used in the file, how many are free, .... I have the suspicion that the NeXT operating system seems to forget about some of the pages in the swapfile at times. When I start a bunch of applications that use plenty of memory my swap file grows to 40 meg and more. After I have successfully exited those applications (Mathematica, ViewGif, Frame, just to mention a view) and start of an application that definitely does not need even close to that much memory (like Mail, Terminal Edit) , it will make the swap file grow even bigger. Causing my machine to crash at some point. Even if I don't excite all the available diskspace the swap file seems to be rather fragmented and and the machine becomes very slow. I have also never observed the swapfile to shrink. The only plausible reason for me for this kind of behaviour would be if certain applications do not correctly deallocate memory when they quit, causing the operating system to believe that that memory is still in use. I have tried a regular C program with a few call malloc or calloc and exiting the prematurely, that did not cause any of the above symptoms though. I haven't gotten around trying a similar experiment with the vm_alloc and zone_alloc functions, or building an application in objective_c, to check if any of those functions generate such behaviour. My question now is whether anybody else has experienced similar problems with their swapfiles, or observed any of the above described behaviour. Thanks Mike -- /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ No user serviceable part inside. Warranty void if opened modified or tampered with. No batteries included. *