lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2005]   [Feb]   [16]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: /proc/*/statm, exactly what does "shared" mean?
On Sat, Feb 12, 2005 at 09:39:20AM -0500, Richard F. Rebel wrote:
> That said, many mod_perl users are *VERY* interested in being able to
> detect and observe how "shared" our forked children are. Shared meaning
> private pages shared with children (copy on write). Is it even possible
> to do this in 2.6 kernels? If so, any pointers would be very helpful.

One thing Hugh didn't mention is the background as to why the shared
statistic was changed: it comes back to the fact that it was a very
expensive statistic to calculate. People running top on systems with
lots of virtual memory in use (ie lots of processes, applications with
shared memory segments) were seeing ridiculous cpu usage (100% for seconds
at a time) by top. As a result, the statistics available from the statm
file were changed to counters making the read of statm an O(1) operation.
This dropped top's cpu usage on a busy system to a much more reasonable
<1%, making it possible to get an idea what a busy system is actually
busy with.

-ben
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 14:10    [W:0.064 / U:0.036 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site