----- Original Message -----
From: Junix Gaspar
To: Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Technical Discussion List
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 3:17 PM
Subject: Re: [plug] memory leak
My comment was actually in support of that. I just want to tell the user
that for starters,
Linux do behave like that (use spare mem for cache) because he cannot
believe that
Linux will actually use that much memory.
not only linux but also other unix variants and non-unix as well for
performance reasons....
Additionally, I believe zombie process can also eat memory, you may want
to check on it also.
nope.. zombie doesnt eat memory that was allocated before by that zombie
process... zombie exist when a program forks and the child finishes before
the parent... where the parent didnt wait for it (eg. wait())... the kernel
still keeps some of its information about the child in case the parent might
need it (eg. child exit status)... a child finishes with either of the
following reasons..
1. normal termination
a. executing a *return* from the main function...
b. calling the *exit* function...
c. calling the *_exit* function
2. abnormal termination
a. calling *abort*
b. receives a certain *signals* (eg. kill -9 )
either the child terminates with normal or abnormal termination regardless
how it was terminated... the kernel closes the open file descriptors and
releases the memory that it was using and the like... the only allocated
memory that was not release by the kernel is the process table entry for
that child (zombie as to speak) until the parent waited for it...
fooler.
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