Multiple inferiors and memory consumption

[Vladimir Prus <vladimir at codesourcery dot com>]

It could be me, but I always expected that using GDB multi-process functionality should be better than
separate GDB instances -- including memory consumption. So, I've just tried to run CVS gdb on itself
inside 4 inferiors, and it looks like each inferior, the amount of data used by GDB (the DATA column
in top) grows pretty much linearly. That is, it does not seem like GDB notices that symbol tables of
all 4 loaded executables are identical (There's a link to the chart: http://goo.gl/0auVf)

Is this something that is going to be improved upon in future?

And now for my real question -- is there any case when using multi-process to debug several applications
not related via parent-child relationship is better than running N copies of GDB?

Thanks,

--
Vladimir Prus
CodeSourcery / Mentor Graphics
http://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/