memory allocation problems (ENOMEM errno code) and maxsiz system parameters

[Bertrand Retif]

Hi *,

I'm running a proprietary C++ process under HPUX 11.00 (hardware is an
HP L2000, 2 CPUs, 2 Gb RAM, 2 Gb swap).
This process uses a HUGE amount of memory.
After 2 hours and a half of processing, it always dies, killed by a
system process that detects a memory allocation problem !

This is the end of the output of tusc (the truss-like tool for HPUX) :

brk(0x67f31000)
....................................................................................
ERR#12 ENOMEM
Received signal 6, SIGABRT, in kill(), [caught], no siginfo
Received signal 6, SIGABRT, in kill(), [SIG_DFL], no siginfo
exit(6) [implicit (kill failure)]
..................................................................
WIFSIGNALED(SIGABRT)

In order to solve these problems, I have tried to set with sam bigger
system parameters like maxdsiz, maxssiz, maxtsiz,
but this is not sufficient :
maxdsiz=3221225472
maxssiz=401604608
maxtsiz=1073741824

These values are the max I can set with sam, but the process seems to
allocate more memory !!!
Do I have to set other system parameters ?

In addition, is there any tool (except ps and top) that can check in
real-time the amount of memory of my process ?
top is useful, but I loose all the memory info when the process dies ...
:-(((
with ps, I have to write a dedicated script that polls regularly the
process :-(((

thanks in advance for any help ...
brgds,
Bertrand.

[John Palmer]

Hi,

It sounds as though your process may be using up all the available swap space.

You say that you have 2Gb of device swap, what is your kernel parameter 'swapmem_on' set to? If 0 then 2Gb is your limit, if 1 then you will have an effective limit of about 3.5Gb.

Check your swap usage with swapinfo -mt
note that if swapmem_on is 1 then this will output a line starting 'memory...'.

The best tool for monitoring process memory usage is 'glance'. This is a purchasable product but you can install a 60 day evaluation copy from your Application CD #2.

Regards,
John