Re: default large-file-warning-threshold (was: Generating the ChangeLog files ...)

[Paul Eggert]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Do we have a way to ask the OS how much (physical-ish) RAM it has?

We could easily add that, using Gnulib's physmem module.  For example, GNU 
'sort' uses physmem to calculate an internal buffer size ranging from 1/8 to 3/4 
of physical memory, depending on some other factors.

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> It could also be a security feature.

It's largely a security feature insofar as it avoids denial-of-service problems, 
and deriving the limit from physical memory capacity helps to avoid these 
problems too.

The 10 MB limit is too small nowadays for typical machines.  I regularly run 
into it and it's a genuine (albeit minor) annoyance.  When the 10 MB limit was 
established back in 2003, machines typically had 64 MiB or so of RAM.  Nowadays 
8 GiB is closer to being typical and the 10 MB limit is way below the sweet spot 
for warnings.

If we were conservative and warned about files larger than 1/8 of physical 
memory, my circa-2011 8-GiB work desktop would warn about files larger than 1 
GiB, and my circa-2005 512-MiB laptop would warn about files larger than 64 MiB, 
and both numbers sound about right.