[erlang-questions] eheap_alloc crash when using mnesia

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Robert Raschke <rtrlists@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:56 PM, Matthew Dempsky <matthew@REDACTED> wrote:
>> I'd love to see a more elegant solution for out-of-memory conditions,
>> but it seems difficult to recover from without explicit memory
>> allocation.  E.g., in C, you can check whether malloc(3) failed and
>> then fail gracefully, making sure your error handling code doesn't
>> need to allocate additional memory.  (Stack space is still implicitly
>> allocated, but I've never heard this to be a problem, except with
>> runaway recursive programs and kernel programming where the stack
>> space is more limited.)
>
> Beware! With modern kernels it is no longer true that malloc always
> fails if you run out of memory. Often you'll find it crashes upon
> access of the allocated memory rather than on the call to malloc().
> I'll need to dig out the references.
>
> Robby
>

See http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/11/30/linux-out-of-memory.html
for a good explanation.

Robby