site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Virtual memory in Mac OS X is managed in a number of ways: The resident memory size: The Private and Shared memory sizes: --Jim On Nov 27, 2007, at 1:04 PM, Markus Hanauska wrote: Hi! 1. The Resident Memory Size (aka Real Memory) 2. The Private Memory Size 3. The Shared Memory Size How comes 1 + 2 != 3??? Is this really so hard to answer? Okay, your turn, please share you wisdom :) -- Best Regards, Markus Hanauska _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/jmagee%40apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... Mike Smith covered a lot of issues, and why it is difficult to make assumptions about this accounting. Here's some more: - physical memory pages are filled with the contents of virtual memory objects - many processes can have many (distinct or overlapping) ranges of these objects mapped into their task virtual address spaces - pmaps reflect the virtual address space to a real (processor-MMU- aware) representation of virtual memory for the task/process - shared regions of address spaces/pmaps optimize overhead for commonly used ranges of address space - but make per-process accounting difficult This value as returned by task_info() indicates how many page-level pmap mappings are currently present in the task's address space. In other words, how many valid page table entries there are for this processes current use of its virtual address space. When a process actually does a load/store from an address, a mapping is normally established for the page in question - raising this value (but nothing guarantees that the system wont add some mappings on its own - to make the overhead of future references less). Lots of things can cause mappings to be be removed once they are entered into a pmap (e.g. unmapping a range of addresses, the memory object's contents being evicted from memory under memory pressure, or copy-on-write operations for the same object in some other process may require all mappings for that object range be removed from all the pmaps currently referencing it - among others). Shared region pmaps are a part of every pmap that contains them, so there is no way to distinguish page-table entries from one process to another. So, as Mike said, this number is a "reasonable approximation" of the pages immediately in use by a process (or available for use by the process without faulting the MMU). Are calculated by walking the virtual address space of a task, looking at the objects mapped there, the resident page counts in those objects, and the reference counts on those objects to try and approximate the number of pages that fall into each category. But if the objects are bigger than what we have mapped, we may not be able to make dead accurate accounting. And, at its heart, all of this is based on the "associated with no process in particular" collection of objects and their resident page counts. We then try and approximate all this info back through the virtual address space mappings to a particular task. Private and shared memory sizes are an even greater approximation than the resident memory size. But they return different info. The private and shared memory counts say "how many pages of the objects I have mapped are cached in memory", regardless of whether I've accessed them yet/lately, where the resident memory size says "how many page- table-entries does my process already have to quickly access those cached pages". So, it is almost never going to be the case that they add up to each other - even in the simple cases with no sharing and mapping in entire objects. But both are useful to know and why we report both. I'd like to ask a simple question. This question has been asked about ten times on various mailing lists here in the past and whenever somebody asked this question directly or indirectly, he never received a reply. Either the question was ignored in the reply or the post never received any reply in the first place. This either means nobody wants to answer it or nobody can answer it... maybe nobody knows it, which would be very, very sad, as that is one of the most fundamental things one should know. It's also nowhere documented. I even searched many MacOS internals books for an answer, but I had no success. It's simply not explained anywhere. It can't be that we have to file a support incident just to receive a reply to this very simple question. So I try it again and I will try it over and over again, till I find someone who can answer it. When you use top or Activity Monitor, does not matter, you receive three interesting memory results per process. The VM stats are not interesting (no matter if VM private or VM total). The three values of interest are: So far, all these values seems self explaining... but they are not at all for one single reason: There are processes, where 1 + 2 is much bigger than 3. How comes? Where is the memory lost? Which pages count towards 1 or 2, but are ignored for 3? For other processes, 1 + 2 is much smaller than 3. How comes? Which memory is ignored for 3, but is accounted towards 1 or 2? I looked at the source of top, here's what I found out (some people might find this useful): A) The resident memory is obtained using the call task_info(). Since it is nowhere documented what this call will count towards memory of the task and what not in the field resident_size, it's basically magic and I can't investigate this value any further. B) The other two values are obtained by getting every memory region of a process using mach_vm_region() (same function vmmap uses) and show some interesting behavior. Basically all private memory is summed up as private memory. Real shared memory (e.g. mmap memory) is summed up as shared memory. This is expected behavior. Memory that is in theory share-able (Copy on write) is treated differently depending on whether it is actually shared. E.g. code of the process or libraries used by the process is counted towards private memory if it is only referenced once (it could be shared, but currently it isn't). That means libraries shared with other processes are counted towards shared memory. This is indeed very clever. If I start a second instance of my process, my code regions are shared between both processes, so the private memory decreases and the shared one raises, which reflects what really goes on within the system. Same with some library code. E.g. libraries that only my process uses are first counted towards my private memory. With a second instance using them, they are counted towards shared memory. You see, pretty clever and desired behavior. C) Only "touched" memory is accounted at all. This is also very clever. Just because I load a library does not mean, that all library code is in memory. Only space for all is reserved. Unless I ever access any page of that library, the page is not really in memory. Same for my code or malloc'ed memory. This is also desired behavior. D) Still top overestimates the real memory my process uses. E.g. I use a library that another process uses, too. I only need one function of the library. If I was the only one using it, only the page containing this function would be real memory, that means only one page would be accounted towards my process (the rest stayed virtual). Now the other process uses all of the library. Because of this, all pages of the library are loaded to real memory. Since I use the library, too, now all the loaded pages are accounted to my process as shared memory, just as they are accounted to the other process. In fact, only one of the pages is in memory because of my process and in use by my process. The rest is only in memory because of the other process. So more shared memory is accounted towards my process than my process actually uses. But since it is accounted towards shared memory, this is something I can live with (forcing the kernel to remember because of which process which virtual page has been mapped into physical memory would be pretty much overkill and bloat all memory structures enormously). After reading the top source, I understand pretty much how the values Shared and Private memory are calculated (the source basically is self explaining in this aspect), what they actually mean and how to interpret them. But I have no idea what resident memory is, what it means, where it comes from and why it is so much different than the sum of private and shared for many processes. Also playing around with vmmap could not really answer that. BTW, vmmap is pretty much useless to build a tool to determine the real memory use of a process. This is because a section, that is COW (Copy on Write) will stay COW, even if some pages within it have already been copied. These pages would now count towards private, but vmmap won't tell me how many pages have already been shadowed like this and whether a page is shared between many processes or already private towards one of the processes makes a huge different. What I'm missing is a tool that works just like vmmap, but reports statistics about every single *PAGE* of memory of a process space, not just every larger region and that takes into account if this page has been copied or not for a COW page. Then one could really make a tool that prints out the real shared and private memory amounts of my process, except for issue (D), where everything of the library that has physical memory is counted towards my shared memory (to correct that, I had to eliminate all other processes using the library and then create the values). This email sent to jmagee@apple.com This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com