| Title | The MPS can't be used to simulate a smaller machine |
| Status | open |
| Priority | optional |
| Assigned user | Gareth Rees |
| Organization | Ravenbrook |
| Description | Developers often work on powerful machines with lots of memory, but want to know how their software will perform on a more restricted machine. The MPS ought to be able to help with this assessment. |
| Analysis | I expect some of this is already possible by creating a limited size arena, but I'm not sure. There are two aspects to this: what happens to performance when, for example, the machine starts to page, but also what happens when allocation actually fails due to lack of resources. Both need to be simulated. Some aspects of low memory behaviour can be test by setting a commit limit, and other aspects can be tested by using a client arena instead of a virtual memory arena. GDR 2013-05-25: MMQA test function/120 [2] needs a feature like this. RB suggests that "ulimit -v" might do the trick (on Unix, anyway) but it doesn't seem to have any effect when I tried it. |
| How found | customer |
| Evidence | [1] Raw notes from Configura workshop <http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2005/02/28/12-40-49/0.txt>.[2] //info.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/master/test/function/120.c |
| Observed in | 1.105.0 |
| Created by | Richard Brooksby |
| Created on | 2005-03-09 18:21:16 |
| Last modified by | Gareth Rees |
| Last modified on | 2016-09-13 10:53:49 |
| History | 2005-03-09 RB Created. 2013-06-16 RB Downgraded to "optional" as it isn't affecting anyone at the moment (see job003499). |