Re: Memory problems

On Fri 29 Nov, 1996, Stewart Forster <slf@connect.com.au> wrote:
>> GNUmalloc is supposed to do that with sbrk(2).
>
> sbrk(2) is only used for claiming memory, not releasing it back to
>the system. At least this is the case on every MAJOR OS that I've seen.

right. The only scheme I've seen that can work is that used in
ralloc (see Emacs) where it mmap()s /dev/zero multiple times, so it
can unmap a whole chunk once freed. (that's the idea anyway, I think
and I'm not entirely convinced it worked that well).

there are some garbage collecting allocators that could do the job,
but I'm not sure how they fit into the malloc() paradigms that people
program to.

if anyone wants to look into this, try 'Malloc/Free implementations.'
 <URL:http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~zorn/Malloc.html>

James.
Received on Thu Nov 28 1996 - 16:38:20 MST