Requesting 'real' memory

Requesting 'real' memory

Posted Feb 7, 2008 0:35 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Requesting 'real' memory by dlang
Parent article: Avoiding the OOM killer with mem_notify

Many people would disagree with your position that vfork is better then fork

No, they wouldn't, because I was talking about the early history of fork and comparing the original fork with the original vfork. The original fork physically copied memory. The original vfork didn't, making it an unquestionable improvement for most forks. A third kind of fork, with copy-on-write, came later and obsoleted both. I didn't know until I looked it up just now that a distinct vfork still exists on modern systems.

the only time strict allocation will result in a more stable system is when your resources are fixed and your applications are fairly well behaved (and properly handle OOM conditions)

The most important characteristic of a system that benefits from strict allocation is that there be some meaningful distinction between a small failure and a catastrophic one. If all your memory allocations must succeed for your system to meet requirements, then it's not better to have a fork fail than to have some process randomly killed, and overallocation is better because it reduces the probability of failure.

But there are plenty of applications that do make that distinction. When a fork fails, such an application can reject one piece of work with a "try again later" and a hundred of those is more acceptable than one SIGKILL.

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