On Tuesday 06 January 2009 12:16:52 Rui Santos wrote:
If you check the final two mmap's, fsck maps 80MB of memory just to check a simple vfat filesystem. What is this ?! 80 MB. I used to run a full system on this, including fsck's. As I stated, this is just an example. Numerous other programs take a lot of memory making a system with 512MB of RAM almost unusable. Even so with a 1GB of RAM ooo-kill is sometimes called to free up RAM.
A 64 bit OS will use more memory than a 32 bit OS, it's a fact of life. Having said that, some fscks are better than others. ext2/3 for example is notoriously bad, and with very large file systems it can run out of memory even if you have 16GB or more in the system (it's one of the things said to be fixed in ext4) I don't use vfat much, so I don't know how it behaves, but it seems to have similar problems. Other file systems, such as reiserfs and xfs, have fsck programs that handle memory better As for when the OO killer is called, it all depends on what you are running on the system. If you don't have swap enabled, the system can't hide away unused RAM, so everything is forced to always be present. That is obviously a drawback on memory starved systems. Anders -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org