Re: Dovecot and NetBSD 6.0

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 04:50:52PM -0400, Steven Sartorius wrote:
> After much googling, poking of configuration files etc. I found that I
> could get dovecot to run by increasing the vsz_limit from 128M to 256M!
> The default value is 64M but I had to raise it to 128M back when I
> moved from version 1.13 to 1.14 (under 5.0_STABLE).  Now, with the new
> 6.0_STABLE I had to bump it up again -- this time to 256M!  Any idea
> why NetBSD requires so much more memory than the dovecot default?

There is quite a difference between (virtual) memory allocation and
virtual memory size. The malloc implementation used (jemalloc) obtains
medium sized chunks from the OS using mmap and cuts them down into
pieces. Unreferenced parts are counted against the virtual memory size
of the process without actually consuming any resources. There are other
possible reasons like size of shared libraries etc that also count into
it. A good first start would be to compare the RES column in top.

Joerg