Re: ideas for returning memory to the OS

Enrico:  I think we're having a communication problem here.  You seem
to think we're trying to work around bugs in the general allocators
provided by the operating systems.  We're not.  We're trying to
improve the performance of our application using knowledge that no
operating system allocator has -- or could ever have -- of its
behavior.  roc's suggestion in this thread is that each of the
different platforms has a specific means of hinting that a page is
ready for reuse, and that we should (on each platform individually)
use those hinting procedures to improve our performance (with respect
to memory utilization).  There's nothing inherently wrong with any of
these OSs general purpose allocators; we simply need better, more
specialized, behavior than they can provide.  How can you possible
argue for modularity in our application while also criticizing glibc
for being "Simply too large!", and then tell us that we should be
trying to push the functionality we need down into glibc?  Why should
it be glibc's problem to worry about how mozilla/firefox use memory?
How is that modular?

-- crowder