The initial question was : "what is the obreak system call".
The obreak syscall is the 'Old Break'. It is used by the system memory
allocation functions (see brk(2), malloc(3) both in the libraries) to increase
the size of a process' virtual address space.
So my issue was unambiguous : the process reached its limit causing any
further memory allocation to be denied.
Being related to my problem (Polycenter NSR 4.2A's nsrindexasm causing this),
this appears as a bug in nsrindexasm : a memory leak which has been corrected
by Digital in patch 1 to NSR 4.2A. If you have very large indexes (> 2 GB)
and if you are using NSR 4.2A they you should really obtain and apply at
least patch 1.
Thanks to John Hascall, Tim Mooney and Alan Rollow for their help.
--
Christophe Wolfhugel -+- SIS, Institut Pasteur, Paris
Boulot : wolf_at_pasteur.fr, $HOME : wolf_at_schnok.fr.net
Received on Mon Jan 20 1997 - 08:26:20 NZDT