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Top-ish utilities should just be preconfigured to only show RSS unless you absolutely need to know what's virt. A lot of griping would diminish. There are many
by cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Top-ish utilities should just be preconfigured to only show RSS unless you absolutely need to know what's virt. A lot of griping would diminish.
There are many specialized allocation patterns -- especially for larger system things like DBs, virtual machine / runtimes etc. -- that will mmap large regions and then only actually use part of it. Many angry fingers get pointed often without justification.
- klik99 2y agoI think the griping occurs when things actually slow down, or system perceived available memory cripples resources. Maybe they point the finger to the wrong place due to misreading virtual, but I doubt people are getting angry when their system is running smoothly. And this attitude "oh memory usage problems are a misreading of top" promotes poor memory management hygiene - and I think there's a strong argument that's all good in server applications / controlled environments but for desktop environments this attitude causes all sorts of knock on effects.