Re: vfork: out of memory, when there's plenty of swap free

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:54:26 -0800 (PST)


On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> It's not the lack of defragmentation but due bad allocation of memory.
> Just to make an example look at the inode cache. It uses a _bad_ way to
> alloc memory. That's the _best_ way to generate _persistent_ fragmentation
> all over the place.

Umm..

It's not that the inode cache uses bad allocators.

It's the fact that inodes have very difficult lifetime behaviour (some
very short-lived, some _extremely_ long-lived), and that makes it hard to
allocate them well using _any_ allocator scheme.

It might certainly be an option to allocate inodes in bigger chunks at a
time. That would at least make the problem become less.

Linus

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