The shrinking role of ETXTBSY

Posted Aug 23, 2021 11:06 UTC (Mon) by excors (subscriber, #95769)
In reply to: The shrinking role of ETXTBSY by anton
Parent article: The shrinking role of ETXTBSY

> On my Debian system, all binaries in /usr/bin combined have a total text size of 285MB (as reported by size -t) and all libraries in /usr/lib combined have a text size of 295MB, so keeping the whole text of a few binaries or libraries is unlikely to lead to problems that the system would not soon have otherwise.

Sometimes people run code that isn't shipped with Debian. Back in 2012, Facebook's page requests were handled by a single 1.5GB executable, generated from PHP code transpiled to C++. (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/04/ex...). I think they switched to a PHP JIT shortly after that, but I imagine other people had (or still have) even larger executables for similar reasons.

The shrinking role of ETXTBSY

Posted Aug 24, 2021 15:48 UTC (Tue) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

So someone who uses such a binary, runs it in a 2GB VM, and tries to overwrite this binary gets an out-of-memory condition in a VM rather than ETXTBSY or a crashing binary. So even this unlikely scenario is not really worse off, and in more usual scenarios things just work as intended.