Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 12:57 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by drago01
Parent article: Quotes of the week

> And the reason for wanting a i386 userspace is ... ?

I like it because it keeps evolution, firefox and chrome all limited to 3Gigs of RAM. I have two boxes I use (one is very work specific, the other is personal, although I use it for most my upstream work as well). My work box is a true x86_64 install base. My personal box is i386 userspace running a x86_64 kernel. Both have 8Gigs of RAM.

My i386 box never has issues with fire-fox, chrome or evolution taking up all my memory. When they get too big, the worse that happens is that they crash and I just restart them.

On my x86_64 box, these apps take over all RAM and it's not till I notice the slow down before I restart them.

Both these boxes run 24/7 so a daily shutdown is not there to clean things up.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 15:39 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (3 responses)

> I like it because it keeps evolution, firefox and chrome all limited to 3Gigs of RAM.

You can limit the virtual address space of specific programs or sessions with ulimit -v, while still benefiting from x86_64 everywhere else. Even better, with ulimit you can choose _any_ limit, not just 3 GiB.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 16:22 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (2 responses)

I was waiting for someone to reply about ulimit. I'm just too lazy to implement a limit on my x86_64 boxes, that I just wait till the system slows down and restart instead.

Also, i386 does have the added benefit that these tools have smaller pointers and do not take up as much memory to begin with.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 15, 2012 10:29 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] (1 responses)

>Also, i386 does have the added benefit that these tools have smaller pointers and do not take up as much memory to begin with.

i386 is hardly a benefit - it has much less registers and you don't have the guaranteed SSE2 availability.

The cake seems to reside near x32 [64-bit instruction set, but with ILP32] instead. (But hey, that's what people already do (mostly - save for a gcc issue) on sparc64 and ppc64 for years, have the x86 folks been sleeping?)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 15, 2012 23:06 UTC (Fri) by faramir (subscriber, #2327) [Link]

You are talking (probably) about execution time/memory bandwidth. He is talking about total memory footprint. Which matters more is going to depend on the context.