We finally got around sometime to set up an OpenBSD 2.7 box and
put up qmail 1.03 on it.
It didn't take us long to notice the memory footprint difference. The
observation always ruined my appetite for dinner, and I now have quite
a dim view towards Solaris :(
Below is a short tabulation of what we have seen:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
vsz The total size of the process in virtual memory,
in kilobytes.
rss The resident set size of the process, in kilo-
bytes.
[Solaris8]> /bin/ps -o vsz,rss,comm -e
VSZ RSS COMMAND
920 568 multilog
904 552 qmail-clean
920 512 qmail-lspawn
1616 864 qmail-pop3d
1592 760 qmail-popup
912 560 qmail-rspawn
1192 816 qmail-send
1808 1064 qmail-smtpd
904 504 supervise
936 528 svscan
896 376 tai64n
1680 1168 tcpserver
[OpenBSD2.7]> /bin/ps -o vsz,rss,comm -ax
VSZ RSS UCOMM
48 408 multilog
36 372 qmail-clean
44 404 qmail-lspawn
40 400 qmail-pop3d
24 320 qmail-popup
40 392 qmail-rspawn
108 448 qmail-send
80 416 qmail-smtpd
24 412 supervise
68 392 svscan
16 268 tai64n
60 500 tcpserver
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The Solaris 8 runs in 32bit mode, on a UltraSPARC IIi Netra 105 box
with 512MB RAM. The OpenBSD runs on a Dell P5MMX166 64 MB RAM.
I recall (but I can't find it right now) that Dr. Bernstein mentioned
somewhere in one of his docs that bloating executable sizes was one
"trait" of Solaris. I didn't know it's this bad! 8-(
May I ask my fellow qmail admins/hacks the following:
o can you confirm my observations?
o can I do anything to reduce the footprints of Solaris executables?
It's really depressing to compare the interactive responses of telnet
host 25 of the two setups above. The Sun box runs at 440Mhz, but
owing to the large process size, it's actually "visibly" slower than
that of a lowly PeeCee running at 166Mhz :(
After the above observations, I don't think I will setup a linux box
soon for tinkering. Too much too soon is not good for health :>
Regards,
Chin Fang
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
