*BSD News Article 86952


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From: kaz@vision.crest.nt.com (Kaz Kylheku)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.lang.c,comp.sys.sun.apps
Subject: Re: Alternative malloc ?
Date: 17 Jan 1997 16:24:25 GMT
Organization: Prism Systems Inc.
Lines: 11
Message-ID: <5bo93p$pn1@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>
References: <5bjh02$j64@chronicle.concentric.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 47.63.64.170
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:34155 comp.lang.c:185836 comp.sys.sun.apps:14738

In article <5bjh02$j64@chronicle.concentric.net>,
Daniel Ts'o <dantso@cris.com> wrote:
>	I am running a big program on FreeBSD 2.1. It is 66Mb and wants to 
>grow a bit and malloc is failing. I presume that it is because, as I recall, 
>the behavior of the BSD default malloc is to allocate in powers of two and the 
>next step would be 130Mb, which is bigger than free swap at the moment.

You are probably running into a process limit. Most UNIXes don't care about
where your malloc function sets the break limit: the allocated memory is 
marked as ``create on write'': when you access it, a page fault occurs which
causes a new page to be mapped to that location.