Re: Subtle MM bug

[Andi Kleen]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 09:29:29PM -0800, Wayne Whitney wrote:
> The application is some mathematics computations (modular symbols) using a
> package called MAGMA;  at times this requires very large matrices.  The
> RSS can get up to 870MB; for some reason a MAGMA process under linux
> thinks it has run out of memory at 870MB, regardless of the actual
> memory/swap in the machine.  MAGMA is single-threaded.

I think it's caused by the way malloc maps its memory. 
Newer glibc should work a bit better by falling back to mmap even for smaller
allocations (older does it only for very big ones) 

-Andi