On Sunday 10 February 2008 08:27, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Sunday 10 February 2008 17:20:05 Randall R Schulz wrote:
Lastly, it seems that were the sort of selective RAM refresh you suggest then Linux would be at a power _disadvantage_ since it tries to keep as much of the RAM as possible filled with (potentially) useful data while Windows seems to try to free it up when possible.
The point is that memory used by the OS in this way doesn't show up as being used by any one application, so it looks to me like what the OP was describing is a bug in kmail
Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought Tom was saying that if memory was not holding useful data the RAM cells that make up that unused memory need not be refreshed, thus saving some power (though it seems that it wouldn't be much). I think this would be problematic to implement, since it would be constrained by (or constrain) the organization of the chips on the DIMMs and of the row / column layout within the individual RAM chips. The extra complexity of kernel software and mainboard circuitry this entails combined with the very modest savings available all suggest to me an impractical idea.
An application's memory can't be used by other applications the way the page cache can, so that memory is just gone for the rest of the system. An application that caches too aggressively without giving the user a chance to limit it can sink a system totally
But then, I've seen kmail eat up all memory+swap on a system, so it could also be a memory leak, not just caching
I've never seen that, but I never leave KMail running after the end of a work day. And I don't usually leave it running when I'm away from the office, so that may be enough to prevent me from seeing these symptoms. Also, I make zero use of IMAP. But from time to time (not often) KMail up an dies on me. Usually the KDE crash manager kicks in, but I think I recall cases where KMail simply vanishes. These crashes seem to be at least somewhat correlated with using the Find Messages... command. KMail must manage its mailbox and index files pretty well, though, because I've never had any corruption following such crashes.
Anders
-- Madness takes its toll
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org