We have a server that is a dedicated search engine. Of late, the primary
process on it has taken to dying when its virtual size reaches 1024MB, which
is the size of physical memory. It makes a core file, and I've been told the
error in the core file says it is dying on a:
"check for null return from malloc - essentially the system saying it won't
give the process any more memory"
according to the lead programmer. The odd thing about this system is
that it has 767MB of swap, with that 1GB memory (don't ask me why, unknown).
It is running eager swap, and the system is DU40d on a 4100.
Does it seem likely that malloc would fail once the process's virtual size
reaches memory size, given that there is insufficient swap to swap the whole
process out, were that necessary? (It is holding a huge file in memory
and updating it periodically with info from a database engine on another host,
and evidently it just continues to grow.)
(I'm working on adding more swap, and we'll see if that fixes it, but it'd
be helpful to have an explanation of what is going on to present.)
TIA...
--
Judith Reed
jreed_at_appliedtheory.com
(315) 453-2912 x335
Received on Thu Nov 19 1998 - 18:50:39 NZDT