CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxmemory-managementgofootprint
user3592290
user3592290

Reputation: 1

How can I lower the footprint of a Go process running on Linux?

I want to execute a "Hello world" program written using Go on device with very limited memory.

When running it over Linux, the current memory footprint seems to be very high (64MB VM Size and 40MB VM Data for hello world).

How can I configure the Go runtime environment to use less memory?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1018

Answers (1)

kostix
kostix

Reputation: 55453

Note that memory usage indicators having "virtual" in their names are useless to analyze as they are, as stated, virtual.

Go's runtime (for binaries built by the gc toolchain, gccgo might use it own approach to allocation—I don't know for sure) on Linux uses the so-called "arena allocator" which at startup tells the OS it wants to "own" a memory region of a pretty huge size, the OS acknowledges this but no memory is really allocated (no physical memory pages, that is), and real allocation only happens when the process really requests the memory.

Due to this, the only sensible memory parameter to analyze is RSS—Resident Set Size, which is the amount of physical memory mapped to the process' address space—the memory it physically allocated and owns—as opposed to virtual stats. See this for a good explanation and skim through this in general.

Upvotes: 3

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