Martin Konold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I do not get the point! Memory management is the job of the kernel. > How does it depend on the distribution?
Actually, it's more complicated than that unless you use sbrk etc. directly. If you use malloc (in C) or new (in C++) then libc plays a role in memory management. I think what's being referred to here is that in earlier versions of libc (i.e. the one in debian 1.1), free, or delete, didn't actually return the memory to the kernel. It just kept it around so that it could use it later. There are some reasonable arguments for doing this (at least for a little while), but it meant that programs that ran a long time and had fragmented memory usage could have a vm footprint that grew without bound. That's even though there were pages that could be returned to the kernel. At least that's my understanding. -- Rob -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
