Can't allocate?

[Per Hedeland]

Mattias wrote:
>The problem above may be caused by low memory, but could also be caused
>by a bug in the emulator, I couldn't say, so I'll keep my mouth shut.
>If it happens everytime (or atleast quite often), you should probably
>dig into the memory handling stuff of the emulator (yikes!).

:-) We still haven't seen Ben's ulimit settings though ('ulimit' without
arguments shows the file size limit, which isn't relevant of course).
What limits exist and their default settings depend on the OS, e.g. in
bash on a FreeBSD 2.2.8 system here 'ulimit -a' says

core file size (blocks)  0
data seg size (kbytes)   32768
file size (blocks)       unlimited
max memory size (kbytes) 65536
stack size (kbytes)      16384
cpu time (seconds)       unlimited
max user processes       256
pipe size (512 bytes)    1
open files               1024
virtual memory (kbytes)  49152

- any of "data seg size", "max memory size", and "virtual memory" could
be the culprit. (Around here we mostly run Solaris, which has rather
more generous defaults:

core file size (blocks)     unlimited
data seg size (kbytes)      2097148
file size (blocks)          unlimited
open files                  64
pipe size (512 bytes)       10
stack size (kbytes)         8192
cpu time (seconds)          unlimited
max user processes          997
virtual memory (kbytes)     unlimited

- the 2 GB data size limit isn't likely to be noticed by Erlang.:-)

--Per Hedeland
per@REDACTED