A test malloc program makes 64-Bit FC-4 dying

[Tony Nelson]

At 2:55 PM -0500 11/3/05, Reuben D. Budiardja wrote:
>Hello,
>I have a small program that I use to check malloc. The program supposed to
>exhaust memory (heap) from malloc, then quit. Running this program on a
>32-Bit RHEL 4, RHEL 3, FC-4, I got the program to terminated pretty quicky
>after malloc cannot allocated more memory.
>However, when I run this program on my desktop: AMD64 FC 4 64-bit, the
>program
>does not terminate after a while. But it grinds this machine to almost to a
>halt, and I got page-swapping, etc. I finally managed to kill the program.
>
>My question is, why does this happen in FC-4 64-bit ? what is the difference
>on this machine and other machine ? This supposedly should not happend since
>I run this program as regular user, and it seems "dangerous" that a regular
>user can almost bring this machine down by running this.
 ...

I can get the same effect with:

    $ grep -r "gzornl" /

I think if you're patient your program will eventually run out of memory.
After that, everything else will be slow for an hour or two as things
slowly swap back in.
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