Re: [PLUG] BSD total free memory in C ?

[Jeff Weisberg <jaw+plug@tcp4me.com>]

| Note that your mail client (?) seems to be broken (at least from the
| thread point of view).

/usr/bin/mail

[remainder of initial response deleted]

no further comment.
corner me at a plug meeting and ask me about
mail clients, brokenness, and such... 
(or don't, I may get violent)


| About your proposed 'read a value from a config file' (which is already
| implemented), what would be a good default value? Is it going to be the
| same default value on all systems or do you need ... an algorithm to
| determine this value?

I would avoid 'all available memory'. On a system with other things running,
it will degenerate into 'thrash around paging in+out of swap space',
and using all available memory will cause other programs to fail if they try
to allocate any memory (depending on the OS and whether it will overcommit
on vm allocations or not (NetBSD does not)).

I would just pick an arbitrary number[1], and expect that users will tune
it if they see fit. I wouldn't expect any particular number to be better
for more users than another.

an example, netscape arbitrarily defaults to using 2M for its memory cache.


	--jeff


[1] 14.37M seems like a good arbitrary number...

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