malloc: not enough core

[Jeffrey W Percival]

In article <925 at marvin.Solbourne.COM> dce at Solbourne.com (David Elliott) writes:
>In article <170 at larry.sal.wisc.edu> jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu (Jeffrey W Percival) writes:
>>How can a virtual memory machine deny memory to the puny df(1) program?
>It's funny.  I've known a number of very smart software engineers who
>believe that "virtual memory" means "infinite memory".


Then again, many know exactly how these two concepts differ.  Some
even go further, though, and wonder about what's happening on the
margin.  Useful concept, that, "marginal availability".  One would
expect malloc() to fail on large requests and not to fail, generally,
on small requests.  Therefore when one sees fairly consistent failure
on small requests, one might suspect some systematic problem, which
in fact was the case here.
-- 
Jeff Percival (jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu)