Re: [Pan-users] pan2 problems on freebsd 6.0

[Jim Reiss]

> Is it possible to put up a dialog box to say that you've run out of 
> memory (or about to run out)? It's not very user-friendly to just die with
> no explanation.
True, it's not particularly friendly, but it's pretty common in the UNIX/Linux
world in the case of memory being exhausted.  It would be difficult to
reliably warn about memory, because other processes are also grabbing
memory.  The best fix is to avoid using so much memory, and that's the
approach that's been taken in what will be the next release of Pan.

> I was watching 'top' just before it crashed. About 18% of my swap space 
> was being used. Shouldn't I still have virtual memory
> left? I've ordered 1 gig of memory. I only have 256 megs right now.
I'm not familiar with the Pan code, but it may be that the program
requested allocation of more than was left.  You could try adding more
swap and see if it defers the crash.

It's just an educated guess that this is a memory problem...I can't say
with absolute certainty.  The symptoms fit what I've seen in the past.
I found that even if I had enough memory to avoid a crash the program (and
the system as a whole) got very slow when loading larger groups because of
all the swapping going on.  I couldn't use Pan at all with certain news
services because their retention was too long and so there were simply
too many headers.

The pre-release version in CVS works very well for me...I hope it
becomes at least a beta before long.