> any rate, this deallocates the memory and stabilized my system.. Is there
> any reason why shared memory belonging to defunct processes is not
> automatically deallocated?
Shared memory is used in various ways. And often is shared by several
processes. (So it's named 'shared'.)
For example, the system recently I worked for use the shared memory
for the very large data structure which is made from various data
files at system boot time (not machine's boot time). The system is
expected to run around the clock. I hear this data structure was
originally a ordinary file, but modified to use shared memory for the
better performance.
The processes which use this data structure are created for one
transaction at a time. This shared memory area is used by many
processes but not all the time. There is the time which no process use
the shared memory.
In this case, it depends on the application whether the shared memory
area is needed or need not any more (ex. system update).
So I think the automatic (or manual?) deallocation should be
implemented by the application.
- -si
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