Re: [Vala] memory detection

[Evan Nemerson <evan coeus-group com>]

On Thu, 2012-08-23 at 16:21 -0700, Charles Hixson wrote:
> Is it possible to detect when a program is using, say, 90% of the memory 
> that is available, so that I can take steps to reduce usage?  I've got a 

You could use getrusage.  I don't think it's currently bound, but it
would be easy enough to add.  Note that this will only tell you how much
memory a program is using, not how much memory *all* programs are using.

To get the total system memory you could just parse /proc/meminfo.  You
could also use this to get the amount of memory available.

> method that would like to use probably more memory than is available, 
> but which can (if it could tell) save stuff to files to free memory it 
> isn't using at the moment.  Garbage collection, isn't quite the same 

Sounds a lot like swapping to disk, which the OS will do for you...

> thing.  I don't want the stuff to be garbage collected until after I've 
> saved it's current state, but to know when to do that, I need to know 
> how much memory is currently free.
>
> I suppose that I could set an arbitrary limit on the number of various 
> things I allow before compacting, but that's a bit ... arbitrary.  And 
> doesn't adapt to different machines without recompiling.