Tor takes too much RAM

[Scott Bennett]

     On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 23:39:45 -0700 Ben Wilhelm <zorba-tor at pavlovian.net>
wrote:

># free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>Mem:         98520      96772       1748          0       2220       5848
>-/+ buffers/cache:      88704       9816
>Swap:        65528      58480       7048
># killall tor
># free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>Mem:         98520      41464      57056          0        644      10356
>-/+ buffers/cache:      30464      68056
>Swap:        65528      22496      43032
>
>I'd love to keep it running, but when it's singlehandedly chewing up 
>more than half of my system's RAM, it just isn't going to happen. Any 
>suggestions on this? Are there config options I can tweak to make it a 
>little less RAM-hungry, or is it just intrinsically a memory gobbler?
>
     How can you tell that it is?  The display of numbers above doesn't seem to
show the important figure, namely, the working set size for tor.  The rest of
what tor allocates in user space is irrelevant.  Kernel space allocations that
are page-fixed (in slang, "wired [down]") are important, but those that are not
fixed shouldn't usually matter either.  What, for example, does the "used"
column above mean?  Is that the total virtual memory allocated to a particular
process?  To all processes?  Or is it just the page frame memory currently in
use by a particular process?  By all processes?  Even top(1) gives more useful
information than your "free" command.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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