[CUBE] OT : When is 1.5 not enough?

[Brooks Graham]

Are you looking at the Resident Size (RSIZE), Resident Private Size 
(RPRVT), or the Virtual Size (VSIZE) column?

The Resident Size is the total amount of memory allocated for both code 
and data along with resident shared libraries for that single process. 
A shared library is only resident in memory once, although many 
processes will link to it and add it's size to it's own in the RSIZE 
column.  As the man page states: "real pages that this process 
currently has associated with it.  Some may be shared by other 
processes"

The Virtual Size includes lots of other items along with the shared 
libraries (resident or not) that the process linked with and if you add 
up all the VSIZEs it should (probably) way exceed your physical memory. 
  Look at the VSIZE of the kernel process.  Mine shows a VSIZE of 519 
MB! (RSIZE=84MB)

Resident Private (RPRVT) is the column you really want to look at for 
the memory consumption of any process (other than the kernel, which is 
a special case)  That's just the resident code and data pages and gives 
a better indication of memory consumption.

HTH

-brooks

On Monday, March 10, 2003, at 01:49 PM, john allan wrote:

>
> I am grateful for that ... amazing ... Mail 130 MB [ 2 MB more just 
> from launching this email to send ], Terminal 70 MB, Safari 78 MB, 
> LoginWIndow [ why? ] 71.4 MB ... Hell's teeth these Unix Geeks know 
> how to produce code.
>
> As someone that remembers OS 6 where a System Folder and all apps 
> could fit in one floppy, and who could do almost as much on it as I do 
> on OS X, I wonder what the hair oil is going on it there.
>
> 227 MB just for System, email and browsing!!!!
>
> [ Oops, 113 MB just gone for iTunes ]
>
> John
>
>>> When is 1.5 not enough?
>>
>> Open a terminal window, type "top" + return. If the number of pageouts
>> mentioned in the header is more than zero, 1.5 GB has not been enough 
>> and VM
>> has kicked in.
>>
>> ,xtG
>