Thanks for the clarification. madvise works great, and SEQUENTIAL
access mode seems right for my application.

Andrew 

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 07:59:42AM +0100, Jaromír Dolecek wrote:
> Andrew Kilpatrick wrote:
> > I'm using mmap to provide access to very large audio
> > files. (possibly 300-600 megs) When I scan through an
> > entire file, the resident size of my process grows 
> > and grows until the RAM on the machine is full and all 
> > other processes are swapped to disk. 
> > 
> > Is this normal? And is there any way of preventing 
> > huge memory usage while still giving simple memory-mapped 
> > access to very large files? 
> 
> Yes, that is quite normal. I believe there is some mechanism
> to unmap the pages after they were inactive for a while, but
> that might not be fast enough for you.
> 
> You probably want to use madvise(2) to tell kernel you access the
> pages sequentially via MADV_SEQUENTIAL - that makes kernel unmap
> the previous pages as you move to next.  Works quite nice e.g. in
> mpg123, should be good for you as well. Also, you probably want to
> use flags MAP_FILE|MAP_SHARED for the mmap(2) call if you don't
> already.
> 
> Jaromir
> -- 
> Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~dolecek/
> @@@@  Wanna a real operating system ? Go and get NetBSD, dammit!  @@@@