Very Computer

   Very strange!  One of my C++ programs bombs with a "virtual memory
   exceeded" message, despite the fact that it never comes close to
   exhausting RAM, much less going to the swap space (that's the virtual
   memory, isn't it?)  I'd surely hear some disk access sounds if the swap
   space were coming into play.

Not if it tries to allocate sufficiently much in one chunk (by mistake
or otherwise), then the OS will just say no and your program will die
if it thinks it cannot live without having its request satisfied.
--
   O_   ---- Peter Dalgaard
  c/ /'  --- Dept. of Biostatistics
 ( ) \( ) -- University of Copenhagen

Any thoughts on this?  

Ted Sternberg
San Jose, California, USA

  What about this scenario:

  malloc(3*1024*1024*1024); /* malloc 3Gb */

 This fails instantly because you attempted to set the brk of your
program past the heap limit (ie somewhere in you stack).  If I remember
correctly, this will not result in a lot of swapping since you haven't
touched any of these pages (all are mapped to the zero page).

  While not a fatal problem in C (malloc will return NULL), in
C++, this could be fatal under some curcumstances, IIRC.

--
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