Please excuse the grammar errors in my last post. I was very tired.
The name of the package that supplies the free function on Linux is
procps, not procpc. It's hosted on SourceForge. To compile my
program, do the following:
$ mv memfree.txt memfree.l
$ make LDLIBS=-ll memfree
John
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:36 PM, John D. Ramsdell
I found out how to compute a good memory limit for the GHC runtime on Linux systems. One opens /proc/meminfo, and sums the free memory with the reclaimable memory. The memory allocated to file buffers and the disk cache are reclaimable, and can be added to the memory of a growing GHC process. Once you get beyond that memory size, thrashing is in your futures.
I have enclosed a short lex program that computes the limit. It's basically what is done by the procpc program called free, except that I printed only the number of interest to a GHC runtime.
John