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On 19-Jun-07, at 4:21 PM, Paul Ducklin wrote:

Using LuaTask 1.6.0 statically linked into
Lua 5.1.2. (A few other packages are built-in,
namely the LuaSocket core, lfs, lrandom, bitlib
and struct.) This is on Linux.

Starting Lua, mem use (as shown by top) is about
1m resident, 2.2m allocated (virtual). Seems quite
modest to me.

Every time I call task.create() (even if the tasks
do nothing but sleep immediately) mem usage goes
up by about 70k resident, but a whopping 8m
of virtual memory. So with 250 tasks I am _using_
just 17m but have 2g allocated! Perhaps unsurprisingly,
at 257 tasks Lua segfaults...

Why 2m for Lua but an additional 8m of virtual memory
for each created task, esp. when the task is only
_using_ a modest 70k?

I was rather hoping to handle a couple of hundred
proxied sockets inside a simple Lua program... whilst
there is plenty of physical memory to support this I
am, absurdly, running out of address space :-)

What's going on?

Each task requires a C stack; the default stack allocation
on linux is quite large. There might be a way to reduce it;
I'm not al tanto with LuaTask. Other operating systems may
(by default) make a smaller C stack, but since C does not
check for stack overflow, that can be dangerous.

You might want to try using plain old Lua coroutines,
which do not require a C stack but which do have some
limitations as a result.