Women in Technology

Article:		When Linux Runs Out of Memory
Subject:		Parsing /proc/meminfo before 'malloc'ing
Date:		2007-03-22 21:20:36
From:		Unna.KB
Sorry. I came across this article after nearly 4 months since it is written. I found this article very useful. I need a help to improve the memory performance of my embedded system. I have a memory performance testcase scenario wherein I allocate two chunks of 32 MB , memset chunk1 to all 1s. Then, memcpy chunk1 to chunk2. In this process, i get my running process killed when it is performing memcpy at 27MB. So, as suggested in the article, i tried to parse the /proc/meminfo file for free usable memory before a malloc operation. Usable Memory = MemFree + Cached, as Buffers and SwapFree are not applicable in my case. MemTotal = 71MB. Before allocation of chunk 1, it showed 60MB of Usable Memory. I allocated chunk 1 using malloc. When i again checked for usable memory for allocating chunk 2 it again showed 60 MB. Should not it alerted me by showing 28 MB, so that i would have averted from allocating the next chunk of 32 MB. Please advice me on how to avoid such memory allocations. Which other field i need to check in the /proc/meminfo.? I cannot use strict overcommit in my system, as application has been on its final stage of development, tuning to strict overcommit leads to lot of NO MEMORY errors.

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• Re: Parsing /proc/meminfo before 'malloc'ing
  2007-03-24 10:36:40  mulyadi_santosa [View]
  
  
  Hi Unna..
  
  Sorry for this late reply. I am also confused why it can actually report there was still 60 MB of free memory after you do malloc()+memset() the first 32 MB block. The things I can suggest are:
  1. Please make sure you get a valid memory report. There is a chance you are reading not-up-to-date information (kinda delayed).
  
  2. Find out more about your OS. Is it Linux? BSD? else? Pay attention for things like how they actually do memory allocation. I also forgot to tell the reader one thing (more because I haven't done closer research about it), kernel actually reserves some amount of RAM for special purpose. I don't know the exact amount, so you probably hit this "unseen" area.
  
  Feel free to reply on this thread... and anyone may CMIIW.
  
  regards,
  
  Mulyadi