Re: weird calloc problem

Manfred Spraul (masp0008@stud.uni-sb.de)
Thu, 18 Mar 1999 14:00:55 +0100


On Tue, 9 Mar 1999 19:51:32 -0600 (EST), marco saraniti
<saraniti@neumann.ece.iit.edu> said:
> I'm having a calloc problem that made me waste three weeks, at this point
> I'm out of options, and I was wondering if this can be a kernel- or
> MM-related problem. Furthermore, the system is a relatively big machine and
> I'd like to share my experience with other people who are interested in
> using Linux for number crunching.
>
> The problem is trivial: calloc returns a NULL, even if there is a lot
> of free memory. Yes, both arguments of calloc are always > 0.

you wrote 'the system is a relatively big machine'.
Perhaps you have run out of virtual memory.

How much memory do you try to allocate? (more than 1 Gigabyte?)
How much physical memory do you have?

You Could also pause the process as soon as you calloc returns NULL
(i.e. if(ptr==NULL) while(1) { printf("error!!\n");} )
and look at the informations in /proc/<pid>. The file formats are
described in 'man proc'.

Regards,
Manfred

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