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From: dichter@soleil.sps.mot.com (Carl Dichter)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Memory boards and data space
Message-ID: <25850@adm.brl.mil>
Date: 5 Feb 91 21:56:25 GMT
Sender: news@adm.brl.mil
Lines: 18

I am not all that familiar with AIX, but on many systems a corruption
of heap can cause malloc() to fail as if it were out of memory.

On SUN OS 4.03, and 386 PCs under Interactive, I have seen heap 
get corrupted when an allocated area was overwritten by only ONE BYTE. 

Some systems, such as HP/Apollo, are more tolerant of this, and to me
that makes them LESS desirable as a development platform.

I suggest that you check all your allocations to make sure they are
adequate, and look for places that you may be overwriting. This often
happens on read()'s, and also on sting functions where the source
string is not NULL terminated.

Have fun.

Carl R. Dichter 
Motorola ASIC Division