Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!sun-barr!newstop!sun!quintus!mark
From: mark@quintus.UUCP (Mark Spotswood)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Memory usage on the RT.
Keywords: memory brk sbrk ulimit
Message-ID: <1247@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 7 Sep 89 22:19:06 GMT
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 19

I am working on a large application which performs its own memory management.
When I run this application, I use up all of the swap space on the machine and
AIX kills the process. I am using ulimit() to determine the maximum possible
break point. The problem is that ulimit() returns the total amount of swap
space on the machine and I am allowed to set the break point to that value.
Then I start writing to the space, and eventually all of the page space gets
used up. When this happens, AIX sends a SIGDANGER signal and kills the process.
I have a signal handler, but it is unable to react in time to prevent the
process from being killed. 

Is there any way to find out how much swap space is actually left while running,
so that I can set the break point to a more reasonable value and avoid being
killed?

I am running AIX 2.2.1 on an RT model 125.

Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.

-- mark