[2826] in Athena Bugs
Re: lots of programs unhappy when memory gets low
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Henry Mensch)
Fri Aug 11 20:39:45 1989
From: Henry Mensch <henry@MIT.EDU>
To: <drmorris@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 11 Aug 89 19:58:44 -0400.
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 89 20:39:18 EDT
(you don't say which release you're running or on which workstation
type you have had these problems. this is *required* information for a
bug report; in the future, please remember to include these details.)
actually, those are mostly the correct answers (as i understand how
unix operates, anyway). segmentation violations and bus errors are
what sometimes happens when a program requests to use more memory than
it can have and it doesn't check that the memory it wanted to use was allocated.
"no more processes" may have been the right message when you tried to
do what you were doing. our kernels are configured for a fixed number
of processes; this number is a function of the amount of memory and
swap your workstation has, as well as other things. it is possible
that you were running at the limit of your process availability when
you asked for another process (by running a program from a shell prompt).
"not enough memory" is what happens when the shell tries to run the
program you've requested. again, this varies depending upon other
tasks you may have happening. emacs and scribe are large subsystems
and are likely to enjoy this error if you run a busy workstation.
the first two types of messages are caused by program bugs. the last
two are caused by the fact that your tasks require more resources than
your workstation has.
this is how i understand these things. i don't swear this is gospel,
but it seems pretty much on the mark.
--
-- Henry Mensch / <henry@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
-- Project Athena Quality Assurance
