Re: The hall of bloat

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 13:57 -0500, William Lovaton wrote:

> Reading your little chat with the kernel guys it seems that there is
> little benefit (or none) in reducing VM Size, why is that?

	Because the kernel won't back this mapping with physical memory until
the application actually tries to use it - i.e. only when the app tries
to write to any these pages does the kernel get a page fault and
allocate some real memory for that page. And because this is the
thread's stack, and because this thread doesn't do much on the stack,
only a handful of pages at the end of this mapping is ever going to
mapped to physical resources.

Cheers,
Mark.