Process size versus cache size.

[Thomas Schulz]

In investigating an out of memory error on a Solaris 8 Sparc
machine (compiled as a 32 bit executable), I find that the process
size increase due to the cache does not make sense.

Over about a week the process size had grown to 257 MB, up from an
initial size of 36 MB. But when I dumped the cache with rndc dumpdb
-cache, the resulting named_dump.db file was only 6 MB in size.
Given the way the file is formatted, I would expect that the in
memory version would be smaller than that.

But when I did a 'rndc flush', the process stopped growing for about
the same number of days that it took to reach 257 MB. That indicates
that the increase in process size really is due to the cache. The
increase in process size from 36 MB to 257 MB does not make sense
given that the cache dump is only 6 MB.

Tom Schulz
Applied Dynamics Intl.
schulz at adi.com