On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 00:56 +0400, Dmitry Baikov wrote: > If you need to stream a file, mmap'ed variant will eat memory up to > file size. Given large enough file, it will eat all you memory and > then will begin to page out unused portions of the file. > Of course, details on when and where will vary depending on VM-system > implementation. > > The thing is, you really need only a small portion of a file. Memory > mapping is useful if you need all data to be (virtually) present in > RAM.
moreover, in 2001-2002, it was actually slower to do i/o this way. when asked about linus said "i know and i intend to keep it that way" (paraphrasing). --p
