Re: [Chicken-users] Segfault with large data-structures (bug)

[Felix]

From: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Segfault with large data-structures (bug)
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2013 12:53:16 +0100

> On Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 08:06:41PM -0600, Jim Ursetto wrote:
>> (bug found -- tl;dr see end of message)
>> 
>> Figured it out: you're exceeding the default maximal heap size, which is 2GB.
> 
> Speaking of which, I wondered about this before: why do we even _have_ a
> maximum heap size?  This is arbitrary and awkward.  For instance, on my
> trusty old G4 iBook, 2G was way more than I actually had (512 MB), while
> at work and on my new laptop it's a relatively small fraction of my total
> memory.
> 
> So on some machines it won't prevent the machine from crashing hard by
> going out of memory, while on other machines it'll just get in the way
> of doing large calculations.
> 
> If there's no good reason for an upper limit, could we get rid of it?

The intention is to provide some sort of soft "ulimit" at the
application level, in case you want to make sure a certain maximum
amount of memory is not exceeded. Or if you want to benchmark memory
consumption, or do other whacky things. So let's keep it for a while.


cheers,
felix