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SubjectRe: Returning "freed" memory to system
  Date: 	Wed, 14 May 1997 12:02:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: yuri mironoff <yuri@buster.rgti.com>

I remember a discussion about returning "freed" memory to the system
while the process is still executing. Apparently AIX has a mechanism for
forcing this to happen. Is this an AIX or POSIX thing, and if so would
this be a good thing to implement?

(Excerpt from IBM rep follows: )


...if a large structure is used early and then left untouched for the
remainder of the program, it should be released. It is not sufficient to
free the space that was malloced or calloced. free releases only the
address range that the structure occupied. In order to release the real
memory and paging space, you must disclaim the space as well.

disclaim Subroutine

Actually, returning "freed" memory was not the primary purpose of page disclaim
at all. When I was tuning Lucid Common Lisp to Apollo's Domain/OS, I used an
undocumented system call to dramatically improve the paging performance of the
Lisp system. MST_$Invalidate allowed one to "invalidate" a region of memory;
the address range was invalidated and when the memory was next referenced the
process would get a fresh page of zeroes rather than whatever contents it had
previously. With a two space stop and copy garbage collector in a system where
paging is occurring due to insufficient real memory, after the live data is
copied from old space to new space the entire old space is likely to be paged
out as operation continues, and then eventually paged back in when the next
garbage collection occurs. By invalidating old space after garbage collection,
this useless page-out/page-in activity is prevented.

At one point (circa 1986 or 1987) IBM asked Lucid if there was anything the OS
could do to improve performance, and I explained how MST_$Invalidate had
dramatically improved performance on the Apollos. The page disclaim system
call was their response.

Leonard

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