>I see my swap space filling up slowly (with 16 MB of physical RAM) and I
>feel stupid having to kill and restart processes or reboot the system
>because of the 'memory leak'.  Regular rebooting because of a kernel
>'feature' doesn't sound very professional to me. :)

You don't have to reboot regularly if you have enough swap.

[...]
>I'm installing new NetBSD boxes in several places here, and I'm a bit
>worried about the memory leakage.  I can live without the bounce buffers. ;)

I think it's been blown a little out of proportion.  I have had
uptimes of greater than a month on my system, and I run some rather
large processes fairly often.  If you let your system stay up for
awhile, you will notice that the swap usage rises quickly at first,
but then tapers off.  It doesn't just keep consuming until it dies
(unless you don't have enough swap).  It reaches a plateu, then stays
there.  It's not a "leak" -- it will not increase without bound.  It's
just over-usage.

I have 20MB of RAM and have allocated 96MB of swap, spread equally
over 3 SCSI drives.  With my system up for several days, this emacs
I'm composing mail in, a sup in progress, a copy of Netscape running,
tvtwm with a 3X3 virtual desktop, and many xterms open, I'm using
roughly a third of that 96MB.  It won't grow beyond this -- it will
just kind of hover there until the next time I reboot.

This is my experience, anyway.  If someone who has actually worked
with the code has enough experience to tell me I'm wrong, and why,
I'll accept that.  Until then, I'll believe this is not a "leak".

Yes, it definitely needs to be fixed, for several reasons.  But, it
does not "force" you to reboot every few days, unless you are under
some very abnormal circumstances.  It is not a "fatal" bug.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                                 michaelv@HeadCandy.com
       --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
     NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, HP300, Sun3, Sun4,
                           DEC PMAX (MIPS), DEC Alpha, PC532
     NetBSD ports in progress: VAX, Atari 68k, others...
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