Out of Memory problem in Ultrix 2.2

[Steve Summit]

In article <3965 at ece-csc.UUCP> harish at ece-csc.UUCP (Harish Hiriyannaiah) writes:
>One of the processes is hogging (70 %) a lot of memory and the system is 
>definitely thrashing. Now, why should other processes get a "ran out of
>memory" error ? Why should it run out of memory if the os is a virtual memory
>machine ? 

There is no such thing as a free lunch.  Virtual memory is mapped
to disk blocks in swap space; your problem is almost certainly
that you are out of swap space.  (This can definitely be a rude
surprise; I can remember getting "nroff: too big" on a VM machine
and having flashbacks to my pdp11 days...)

Swap space problems are frequent when "worksatations" with
relatively small disks are pressed in to service as timesharing
machines.

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs at adam.pika.mit.edu