wine users - Apr 2003 - Excessive Swap with MSVC++ and Wine

Prompted by Jonathan Grant's article I've been playing with running the
MSVC++
command line tools under Wine. In particular I'm trying to compile and link
a
large DLL - about 4M in size.

The problem is the amount of memory used by link.exe. At the moment, with 256M 
of real memory and 1G of swap I quickly run out. Under Windows2000, on the 
same machine, the link takes a long time (30mins - 1 hour) but does complete.

I am assuming that under Windows2000 (where I think I have less swap) link.exe 
is eventually being denied additional resources and runs with what it's got.
Under wine it seems that all it's resource requests are granted until the 
kernel kills the process when swap runs out.

Is there any way to get Wine to limit the resources it grants, but in a 
graceful way that can be handled by the program being run?

Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks,
Phil

On Sunday 27 Apr 2003 14:51, Phil Thompson wrote:
> The problem is the amount of memory used by link.exe. At the moment, with
> 256M of real memory and 1G of swap I quickly run out. Under Windows2000, on
> the same machine, the link takes a long time (30mins - 1 hour) but does
> complete.
That sounds very similar to a problem I used to have with another program. I 
used to run NewsXpress under Wine (quite a nice, and somewhat non-traditional 
in design, newsreader) but I found that, even with 1GB of RAM, I had to add 
lots of swap in order to download large numbers of headers. When I used to 
run it on Windows, I was able to get tens or hundreds of thousands of headers 
in 128MB RAM without even approaching the point where swapping would be 
needed.

I think it may be some inefficiency in Wine's memory allocation subsystem - 
perhaps it consistently allocates too much which mounts up each time the 
program requests more. (When I exited NewsXpress, only about half of the 
memory it had claimed was freed; the rest had to be reclaimed with 'killall 
wine'.)

Doesn't help you very much, but perhaps it might help someone to track down 
the problem.

Stephen