On Sat, Jul 03, 2010 at 05:40:45PM +0200, Claudio Jeker wrote: > 35M, that is insane. Either they have machines with infinite memory or you > can kill the boxes easily.
You don't need 35MB per client connection if interfaces like sendfile(2) are used. All the kernel has to guarantee in that case is copy-on-write for the file content as far as it has been "send" already. Media distribution server normally don't change files inplace, so the only backpressure this creates is on the VFS cache. Let's assume the server is busy due to a new OpenBSD/Linux/Firefox/whatever release. A lot of clients will try to fetch a small number of distinct files. The memory the kernel has to commit is limited by the size of that active set, not by the number of clients. Joerg
