In other words -- with 1MB stacks (-Xss1m), do you actually bump your RSS by 1M every time you create a thread, or do you just consume 1MB of VSZ, plus a few actual pages top and/or bottom?
In other, other words, on 64b systems, and assuming it does the right thing (just map), is there any real downside to large (say, 10MB) "just-in-case" stacks?