mmap and memory usage
I am writing a program that receives huge amounts of data (in pieces of different sizes) from the network, processes them and writes them to memory. Since some pieces of data can be very large, my current approach is limiting the buffer size used. If a piece is larger than the maximum buffer size, I write the data to a temporary file and later read the file in chunks for processing and permanent storage.
I'm wondering if this can be improved. I've been reading about mmap for a while but I'm not one hundred percent sure if it can help me. My idea is to use mmap for reading the temporary file. Does this help in any way? The main thing I'm concerned about is that an occasional large piece of data should not fill up my main memory causing everything else to be swapped out.
Also, do you think the approach with temporary files is useful? Should I even be doing that or, perhaps, should I trust the linux memory manager to do the job for me? Or should I do something else altogether?
Answer
Mmap can help you in some ways, I'll explain with some hypothetical examples:
First thing: Let's say you're running out of memory, and your application that have a 100MB chunk of malloc'ed memory get 50% of it swapped out, that means that the OS had to write 50MB to the swapfile, and if you need to read it back, you have written, occupied and then read it back again 50MB of your swapfile.
In case the memory was just mmap'ed, the operating system will not write that piece of information to the swapfile (as it knows that that data is identical to the file itself), instead, it will just scratch 50MB of information (again: supposing you have not written anything for now) and that's that. If you ever need that memory to be read again, the OS will fetch the contents not from the swapfile, but from the original file you've mmaped, so if any other program needs 50MB of swap, they're available. Also there is not overhead with swapfile manipulation at all.
Let's say you read a 100MB chunk of data, and according to the initial 1MB of header data, the information that you want is located at offset 75MB, so you don't need anything between 1~74.9MB! You have read it for nothing but to make your code simpler. With mmap, you will only read the data you have actually accessed (rounded 4kb, or the OS page size, which is mostly 4kb), so it would only read the first and the 75th MB. I think it's very hard to make a simpler and more effective way to avoid disk reading than mmaping files. And if by some reason you need the data at offset 37MB, you can just use it! You don't have to mmap it again, as the whole file is accessible in memory (of course limited by your process' memory space).
All files mmap'ed are backed up by themselves, not by the swapfile, the swapfile is made to grant data that doesn't have a file to back up, which usually is data malloc'ed or data that is backed up by a file, but it was altered and [can not/shall not] be written back to it before the program actually tells the OS to do so via a msync call.
Beware that you don't need to map the whole file in the memory, you can map any amount (2nd arg is "size_t length") starting from any place (6th arg - "off_t offset"), but unless your file is likely to be enormous, you can safely map 1GB of data with no fear, even if the system only packs 64mb of physical memory, but that's for reading, if you plan on writing then you should be more conservative and map only the stuff that you need.
Mapping files will help you making your code simpler (you already have the file contents on the memory, ready to use, with much less memory overhead since it's not anonymous memory) and faster (you will only read the data that your program accessed).