out of virtual memory?

[John D. Polstra]

In article <1901 at brazos.Rice.edu> kam at titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu (Katherine Minister Hosch) writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 150, message 14 of 15
> . . .
>current soft limit: 251658240;   hard limit: 251658240
>
>/home/titan/kam/fsats/test.a, line 11, char 15:fatal: Operating system denied v\irtual memory expansion to 6420479
>
>Ada command  finished at Fri Sep 29 13:41:07
>
>Has anyone ever seen/heard of running out of virtual memory?

I've seen related questions a couple of times recently.  Remember:  the
amount of virtual memory that a process can allocate is limited by the
amount of swap space that is available on disk.  The total amount of
virtual memory allocated to all processes can never exceed the size of the
swap region.

You can get a good idea of the amount of virtual memory available by
executing the command "/usr/etc/pstat -s".  I just tried it, and it
printed out:

    5008k allocated + 1792k reserved = 6800k used, 44248k available

A simple test program then succeeded in allocating 43 Mbytes of memory,
but failed when it tried for 44 Mbytes.  So the "available" figure is very
close to the amount of virtual memory that can be allocated.  If you want
to increase this number, you will have to repartition your disk with a
larger swap region, or add a second swap region using SWAPON(8).

   John Polstra               jdp at polstra.UUCP
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