Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!ames!ncar!boulder!hartzell
From: hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George Hartzell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Re: Mips m/120 no more processes/unable to allocate xxx errors
Keywords: no more processes memory errors.
Message-ID: <14060@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 20 Nov 89 00:16:09 GMT
References: <11637@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George Hartzell)
Organization: MCD Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 25
In-reply-to: ams@gauss.Princeton.EDU (Andrew Simms)

In article <11637@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, ams@gauss (Andrew Simms) writes:
>I currenty have 7 NCD Xwindow display stations who run xdm and the gwm
>window manager package off the m/120.  I installed gwm a while ago 
>when we had 3 Xterminals and we never saw a problem.  The no more processes
>errors showed up with the additional terminals.  Closer examination of
>the gwm executable showed it was revealed that it was 

I haven't installed gwm on our system (yet...), but had a "running out
of memory" problem on our M-2000 system (with 32 Mb and LOTS of swap
space) while running some software that used the GNU regexp stuff.
The problem was that the regexp package uses alloca, and needs to have
C_ALLOCA #defined so that it forces garbage collection every so often.
Since there was an alloca in libc.a, I didn't use Doug Gwyn's C alloca
package, and so I didn't #define C_ALLOCA.  It turned out that the
alloca in libc is Doug's C version, not a "true" one.  #defining
C_ALLOCA fixed my problems.  

So, you might want to check whether gwm uses alloca, and if so check
to see if it garbage collects based on an #ifdef C_ALLOCA.

g.

George Hartzell			                  (303) 492-4535
 MCD Biology, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309
hartzell@Boulder.Colorado.EDU  ..!{ncar,nbires}!boulder!hartzell