Sébastien Sablé <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> added the comment: [sorry for the late reply, I have been on holidays]
Martin: you are right that this memory is moved to swap and does not consume any "real" memory; however we decided to work on this patch because we observed on our application some performances degradation due to this memory not being deallocated correctly. Since then we have done some quite extensive tests (with the help of a consultant at Sun): they have shown that this unnecessary swapping has a noticeable impact on performances and at worst, when the system memory is saturated, can completely put a server on its knees for several minutes (we're talking of top of the line SunOS and AIX servers with hundreds of GB of memory). I will write a complete document explaining the tests and observations that we did, but this memory issue was critical for us given the degradation of performances it was generating on our production servers. Concerning dlmalloc, you are right that it would be cleaner to improve obmalloc so that it uses mmap when necessary, instead of adding another layer with dlmalloc (even though that is what actually currently happens on linux systems where dlmalloc is integrated in libc). I will try to do that patch in coming weeks (obmalloc mostly allocates some 256KB arenas so it should nearly always use mmap). _______________________________________ Python tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue3526> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
