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Freeing of allocated memory in Solaris/Linux
I found this in the one of the articles here
This is regarding solaris. the article says that whenever free() call is executed the memory is returned to the application but not to the system so that the application might reuse the freed memory. This is the reason why the memory used used by a process will gradually increase rather than decrease with every free.Till now i thought that the freed memory will be returned to the system and it will be reused according to the systems decision.But in fact this is not the case.
I am facing a practical problem where the process is taking 3.8GB of memory and that point of time one of the sybase library is faling to allocate memory and failing abruptly.
Now my question is ,is there a way where i could somehow make the application return the memory to the system?