[pulseaudio-discuss] Leaky shm??

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 30.09.08 09:42, Nick Thompson (rextanka at comcast.net) wrote:

> Heya,
>
> On both x86 and on an arm system there appears to be a huge shm file:
>
>> /dev/shm
>> -r-------- 1 nick nick 67108888 2008-09-29 09:33 pulse-shm-319812569
>
> This is with pulseaudio 0.9.12
>
> Is there any explanation for this somewhat large file?

It's POSIX shared memory used for transfer data between PulseAudio
clients and the server. Each client and the server own one of these
segments and place data in there they want other processes to access.

It's a sparse file. Usually only the first blocks are used. Use "du"
to learn how much actually is used of the 64M pre-allocated.

Note that the size of the file is misleading. Due to the way modern
memory managers work that size is more of an upper limit of what could
be used, only the value shown by "du" is actually taken up.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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