On Saturday, July 27, 2002, at 06:51 AM, Pejvan BEIGUI wrote: Hi guys, I have a question regarding the VM management in Mach/Darwin. Since I don't like to reboot my mac, and since I use a lot of different applications, not at the same time, I'm surprised to see that the VM storage on my drives keeps going up, and never fall down. I have a tibook 500MHz, with 512MB of RAM, so I don't think that it's normal to have so many VM used at the same time on my machine : ...[list of swap files deleted]... So, is there a way to tell the system to update the VM ? Or tell him to remove the unused VM swapfiles ? It happens automatically as the space is released. But this is controlled by a user-level daemon process (dynamic_pager). If that got killed off somehow, you would neither free up any unused ones or allocate any new ones. While I've never seen that happen, its something to look for in extremely weird cases. Plus here's the output of my top : Processes: 55 total, 2 running, 1 stuck, 52 sleeping... 159 threads 12:44:56 Load Avg: 0.73, 1.49, 1.34 CPU usage: 8.3% user, 17.4% sys, 74.4% idle SharedLibs: num = 126, resident = 15.3M code, 564K data, 3.75M LinkEdit MemRegions: num = 8314, resident = 163M + 4.56M private, 46.9M shared PhysMem: 59.6M wired, 283M active, 164M inactive, 506M used, 6.21M free VM: 1.69G + 56.4M 253129(0) pageins, 597340(0) pageouts PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 5852 top 15.7% 0:00.78 1 14 17 424K 296K 680K 1.70M 328 Terminal 1.6% 21:56.01 7 131 877 3.04M 7.81M 7.14M 67.0M 333 MicrosoftK 1.6% 2:11.97 1 53 50 220K 1.12M 308K 38.7M 5583 Proteus 0.8% 27:28.55 5 139 707 58.7M 5.92M 60.2M 181M 5584 imservices 0.8% 4:18.92 4 32 506 49.6M+ 804K 49.3M+ 108M 5594 imserviced 0.8% 1:26.12 1 22 34 1.24M 768K 1.84M 4.74M 73 Window Man 0.0% 3:43:16 3 2527 3192 3.65M 26.2M 29.6M 116M 0 kernel_tas 0.0% 92:30.52 26 0 - - - 47.7M 400M 327 SystemUISe 0.0% 16:15.06 4 138 237 1.83M 4.10M 2.59M 60.9M 289 java 0.0% 16:13.80 26 205 181 2.85M 260K 2.33M 171M 133 configd 0.0% 13:52.09 4 108 173 456K 632K 768K 4.29M 2431 Dock 0.0% 3:28.85 3 106 195 1.32M 5.12M 2.58M 56.1M 330 MicrosoftM 0.0% 3:15.36 1 77 37 184K 552K 288K 26.1M 3323 Microsoft 0.0% 2:08.50 2 75 141 2.79M 6.58M 3.12M 58.3M So what is this kernel_tasks using 400M VSize ? The kernel allocates some virtual address space (space in submaps, not actual memory) for efficient future memory allocation and wiring later on. Top picks that up and reports it. Kernel leaks would most likely cause a rise in wired memory. With 512MB of memory, the 59.6MB of wired memory is not a major concern (some wired data structure counts scale up with amount of physical memory). There are uses of true virtual (pageable) memory within the kernel. Specifically, some of the (not currently in-use) texture maps for graphics acceleration are stored in kernel pageable memory. And some (sent, but not-yet-received) Mach IPC data is stored in pagable kernel memory. There is no way to distinguish between over-commit virtual address space allocations in the kernel, and true pageable memory allocations using top. So we can't tell how much of that 400MB of kernel virtual falls into each of the two categories above. In fact, it isn't possible to tell that for any other task/process either. Since your maximum "dirty virtual" memory size of ~1GB (7*76MB swap files + 512MB of physical memory) is less than the 1.69GB of all virtual allocations reported by top (even when you remove the 400MB of potentially unused space in the kernel), it may be correct. Your top says there are 55 processes, and you only show 14 of them. Is there anything else of interest in those other 41 processes? --Jim _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.