Re: [PLUG] Re: Why am I running out of memory?

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 11:39:56AM -0500, Reilly, Kris wrote:
> The 2.4 kernels have a 2G memory limitation per pid.  I ran into this same
> problem performance tuning a mysql database.  Our solution was to break the
> process into multiple processes.  Parent/Child isn't good enough either, as
> the parent pid will reach the 2G limit and then hang.

That's what I'm finding empiracally, too.  I wrote a little test
program yesterday that just malloc'ed huge chunks of memory to see how
big a process could get until malloc() started returning ENOMEM.  I
found I could get to around 2 GB - 32 MB.  And, perhaps incidentally,
the kernel running on this box is right around 32 MB in size.

We've been talking anyway about how to split up the process so that we
can test more genes at once, and this finding will likely speed up
that process.  As someone else pointed out in this thread, this is
already a cpu-bound process, so for performance reasons we really need
to try to avoid paging anyway.

Walt

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