Re: TCP Socket, Forking, Memory exhaustion

[BrowserUk]

Are you sure that forking a script doubles your memory usage?

I thought that on most systems running a second copy of a program, perl in this case, would only increase overall memory usage by the size of the read-write data area only. As the readonly data and code memory would be shared by the processes. Ditto for all subsequent copies.

If you're using something like top or PS to assess the memory usage, it may be telling you porkies. Try starting one copy and then record the total free memory figure. Then start a second copy and record the total free memory figure again. The difference will be your actual per process consumption, which in many cases will be far less that the figure suggested by ps/top.

[oha]

it's called copy on write. all the pages used by process are marked this way, whenever one of the process forked try to write to that page a trap is raised and the OS copy the page.

Oha

[BrowserUk]

Yes I know. (On Unix that is. They are just "shared memory segments" on Win32 for example).

But it's not as beneficial as people think for perl processes, because "compiled" Perl code and Perl program data, are both RW memory to the perl executable. And even read references to perl variables can caused write accesses (and therefore COW) to the memory that holds them.

But the main point of my post is that ps/top will often, if not always, count the shared, readonly memory (the perl executable's code and RO data) against each process that shares it, which may be giving the OP a false impression of how much memory is consumed by his existing forking solution.