Question about 'top' values on memory usage, now threads

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2007-Oct-15 12:43:39 -0400, William LeFebvre <bill at lefebvre.org> wrote:
>Whether there is actual swapping going on or not, processes will still need 
>swap space.  There needs to be a backing store for every page that's in 
>physical memory.

This isn't true for FreeBSD.  You can even totally disable
paging/swapping with the config option "NO_SWAPPING" if you want.

FreeBSD allocates swap space on an "as needed" basis, rather than
pre-allocating swap.  The advantage is that a process can request
virtually unlimited amounts of memory via sbrk(2), mmap(2) or
malloc(3).  The downside is that a process may be killed without
notice when it writes to some previously allocated but unused part
of its address space.  See the archives for the full bikeshed.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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