unix RAM usage (Was: Re: OOo background color - Re: [GNHLUG] MerriLUG Nashua, Thur 20 Sep, OpenOffice Styles - for groff fans and real people too)

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Sep 25 21:37:35 EDT 2007


On 9/25/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> the virtual size is 47M, but the shared and resident sizes rarely
> change from their combined 8MB ...

  This is skirting the edge of my understanding, but my understanding
is that the virtual size is the total of all pages mapped into a
process's virtual address space.  That can include:

- pages in main memory ("RAM")
- pages swapped out to disk
- mmap'ed files
- shared libraries
- IPC shared memory
- kernel resources
- hardware I/O

  So, basically: Here there be dragons.  ;-)

-- Ben


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