[CentOS] free

[Gordon Messmer]

On 07/14/2010 01:34 PM, Todd Denniston wrote:
>
> Did your test program actually USE the 100 megs of ram?
> Because of "lazy allocation" or "optimistic memory allocation"*** as done by the kernel,

"over-commit" is the term you were looking for.

> the memory
> is not actually consumed until used.  When I did something similar, I simply wrote a char to each
> byte of memory(there are faster ways, but I wanted simple not fast)

I'm pretty sure you just need to write one byte to each page. (write one 
byte, move the counter by getpagesize()).