[ILUG] Netscape Gripe

[Niall O Broin]

Rob Hill said

> Netscape is currently taking up 48052k on my machine!!

Yes, it does tend to chew up memory :-)

> I've also noticed that it writes straight to the disk rather than
> waiting for the system sync which totally defeats the purpose of the
> whole thing

Linus I'm not, but I don't know that Netscape can do this. A normal program
just issues read and write calls, and exactly how the OS handles the IO is
beyond the programs reach - it neither knows nor cares. I suppose Netscape could
fork and exec sync every now and again, but I doubt it. What makes you think
that Netscape "writes straight to the disk rather than waiting for the system sync"

If it's your disk activity light, then you're misinterpreting what you're seeing.
Without explaining things to the point of nausea, imagine what happens when you do

dd if=/dev/null of=/somewhere/somefile bs=100k count=1024

on your machine. If you've got modern fast disks, you'll end up with a 100MB file
called /somewhere/somefile and the whole process will take less than 30 seconds
but you'll surely see some disk activity, because you most likely don't have enough
RAM to buffer all that I/O - if you do, why bitch about Netscape's miserable 48M ?

As to why you've got so little space for buffering, Netscape's miserable 48M might
have something to do with that.


Kindest regards,


Niall  O Broin		

UNIX Network Administrator 		 	nobroin at esoc.esa.de
Ground Systems Engineering Department		Ph./Fax  +49 6151 90 3619/2179
European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany