From: Ron / BCLUG via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
Thanks for looking at this
D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote on 2025-02-01 11:14:
Why is all that space being used?
I would expect that most of the space is taken by immutable and hence shareable stuff (code).
I think this is correct: basically most of the processes are Python interpreters plus the scripts they're running.
Python interpreters are surely shared. That's the way Linux works for compiled languages like C. As I understand it, the Python code is pre-compiled into some kind of byte-code (.pyc file). I don't know when. If it is ahead of time, the result ought to be (largely) stored in a read-only file that gets memory mapped into RAM, thus being shared. If byte-code isn't shared, this seems like a scandal. If the space is actually being consumed by data, how could mailman be so profligate?