samba - Sep 1998 - How much memory is needed?

This is a printout from ps -axl:

 F    UID   PID  PPID PRI NI SIZE  RSS WCHAN      STAT TTY   TIME COMMAND
...
  0     0    81    44   1  0  139  672 12db2f     S     ?    0:02 nmbd
  0     0    97    44   1  0  389 1160 12db2f     S     ?    0:01 smbd
  0     0   112    44   1  0  393 1076 12db2f     S     ?    0:01 smbd
  0     0   114    44   1  0  413 1124 12db2f     S     ?    0:03 smbd
  0     0   118    44   2  0  417 1080 12db2f     S     ?    0:03 smbd
  0     0   120    44   1  0  393 1108 12db2f     S     ?    0:05 smbd
  0     0   124    44   1  0  389 1096 12db2f     S     ?    0:02 smbd

Does the value in the RSS column indicate that every client connected to
the samba server needs about 1 MB of RAM? And if so, would a server with
16MB RAM and 20 clients swap a lot (maybe so much that the clients lose the
connection)?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trond Nystuen                                     trond.nystuen@ha-nett.no

You wrote:
| F   UID   PID  PPID PRI NI SIZE RSS  WCHAN   STAT   TTY    TIME CMD
| 0     0    81    44   1  0  139  672 12db2f     S     ?    0:02 nmbd
| 0     0    97    44   1  0  389 1160 12db2f     S     ?    0:01 smbd
|
| Does the value in the RSS column indicate that every client 
| connected to the samba server needs about 1 MB of RAM? And if so,
|  would a server with 16MB RAM and 20 clients swap a lot (maybe so much
|  that the clients lose the connection)?

	No, especially if it's Solaris (;-))

	All Unixes try to keep just one copy of the executable	
	code in memory, and only need to allocate real memory for
	data when you start an additional copy of the program.

	Machines with shared libraries do even better: while many
	programs may use a library, only one copy of  it's code
	is present.

	This makes RSS a very bad estimator: it's more like the
	**worst possible case**.  I use RSS-(size of program +
	size of all shared libs used) as my estimator for the second
	and subsequent copies.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Cherish your enemies.  They're harder to
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | come by than friends and more motivated.
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