On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Gerald Pfeifer wrote: > The tester where this problem first surfaced as a 32-bit Athlon machine, > with 512MB main memory and 1GB swap. The machine runs FreeBSD 5.4. > > I agree with your intuition that even if the machines is swapping heavily, > this amount of virtual memory (1.5GB) should suffice. > > However, a bit of investigations makes me believe that, at least in the > default configuration, FreeBSD 5.4 will refuse to allocate more memory to > a single process than the system has main memory.
I know managed to track this down: http://plone.org/documentation/faq/freebsd-memory-error By default in FreeBSD 5.X or 4.X the kernel will limit the amount of RAM any one process can use to 512MB (older versions of FreeBSD this was lower). You can tweak this in /boot/loader.conf [...] So, it's not a question of main memory or swap, but a limit in terms of virtual memory per process on this specific tester. I don't know how common such limitations/systems are, so this may be less critical than it originally seemed. Still, this shows that we did have an increase in memory use recently, which may be worth looking into. (And, of course, I'm happily testing Tom's patch as we speak.) Gerald
