Re: mergemem: announce & design issues

Philipp Reisner (e9525415@student.tuwien.ac.at)
Wed, 18 Mar 1998 09:57:33 +0100

Jacques Gelinas wrote:
>
> If I understand correctly, basically, when a program starts, it does
> various initialisation which uses some memory. The logic of mergemem is
> that if you start several instance of a given program, there is a good bet
> that some memory will be initialised exactly the same. So mergement is
> comparing different instance of a program and find all the identical
> pages. Then it puts those page read-only and merge all process to share
> the same physical page. It also puts the page with the copy-on-write
> flag so a process can still continue to modify the page, if needed later.
>
> Am I right ?
>

You are perfectly right!!
Are I am allowed to take your text for our readme?

> This sound like a very good way to save memory. I am currently developping
> an X terminal installation kit for schools. As I understand, this tool
> would do good things with that kind of environnment where mostly you have
> 10-15 users logged all the time, all running the same desktop components,
> so many waste duplicate pages.
>
> I will check that. Wonder how much can be saved with say 3-4 users running
> kde + netscape.

It will be used at the university in vienna, in a lab, where 30 students
(on X-terminals) are running a prolog interpreter on one alpha machine.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
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-----
Philipp Reisner E-Mail mailto:e9525415@student.tuwien.ac.at

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