Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!shelby!apple!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!andante!ulysses!dptg!mtunb!jcm
From: jcm@mtunb.ATT.COM (was-John McMillan)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general
Subject: Re: Large programs core dumping upon execution
Keywords: swap memory 3b1
Message-ID: <1574@mtunb.ATT.COM>
Date: 27 Jul 89 18:48:51 GMT
References: <211@comhex.UUCP> <929@icus.islp.ny.us>
Reply-To: jcm@mtunb.UUCP (John McMillan)
Distribution: unix-pc
Organization: dis-
Lines: 27

In article <929@icus.islp.ny.us> lenny@icus.islp.ny.us (Lenny Tropiano) writes:
>In article <211@comhex.UUCP> sysop@comhex.UUCP (Joe E. Powell) writes:
>|>Has anyone else ever noticed that very large (over 300K) files
>|>sometimes tend to core dump when they are invoked?  They usually
>|>work fine, but every now and again, the program will just refuse
>|>to start up.  Is it just me or have other people had this happen?
>|>
>|>I've noticed this occasionally on nethack and moria, but more
>|>often with gcc (esp gcc 1.35).
>|>
>|>I'm running 3.51a, with a 40 MB drive and 2.5 MB of RAM.

Uhhhhh.  Finally, a chance to disagree with Lenny!?-)

Sounds to me like our once-a-week visit to SWAP land.

If you've exhausted SWAP space, it is presented to the program as
an ENOMEM error in some phase of forking/execing/malloc-ing/stack-extending.

And programs often presume there's lotza mem, so why check return values!

	***** NOTE WELL:  _MY_ code never does this ]8-)  *****

If so: run less, or allocate more.

john mcmillan	-- att!mtunb!jcm -- "What NEVER? ... Hardly EVER ..."
					Gilbert & Sullivan (Pinafore)