[Python-Dev] Darwin's realloc(...) implementation never shrinks allocations

[Jack Jansen]

On 3 Jan 2005, at 23:40, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Most people on Mac OS X have a lot of memory, and Mac OS X generally 
> does a good job about swapping in and out without causing much of a 
> problem, so I'm personally not very surprised that it could go 
> unnoticed this long.

*Except* when you're low on free disk space. 10.2 and before were 
really bad with this, usually hanging the machine, 10.3 is better but 
it's still pretty bad when compared to other unixen. It probably has 
something to do with the way OSX overcommits memory and swapspace, for 
which it apparently uses a different algorithm than FreeBSD or Linux.

I wouldn't be surprised if the bittorrent problem report in this thread 
was due to being low on diskspace. And that could also be true for the 
original error report that sparked this discussion.
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman