Emacs is tiny. [LWN.net]

Emacs is tiny.

Posted Jan 2, 2003 5:47 UTC (Thu) by kbob (guest, #1770)
Parent article: Fixing up the shared page table patch

the emacs process being used to write this article shows 33 separate, writable virtual memory areas

And the mozilla process I'm using to reply shows 267 separate writable areas! Emacs has definitively lost the title of Unix's most bloated app.

to post comments

It depends on how it does memory management

Posted Jan 2, 2003 15:57 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

See the section "Buried in VMA's" here:

http://lwn.net/2001/0809/kernel.php3

in particular read Chris Wedgewood's detailed analysis. Seems
that Mozilla alloc's memory in small chunks and GLIBC's handling
of this is rather weird, which leads to lots of these problems
and lots of VMAs.

I think some of the fixes for this have gone into the 2.5.X kernel,
but I don't know abouit 2.4, so maybe simply switching kernels or
updating your GLIBC may reduce the VMAs a lot.

Emacs is tiny.

Posted Jan 3, 2003 23:57 UTC (Fri) by mbligh (subscriber, #7720) [Link]

Doesn't really matter ... unless they're large enough to span multiple PTE-pages (ie 4Mb blobs on non-PAE).