Women in Technology

Article:		When Linux Runs Out of Memory
Subject:		Re: Parsing /proc/meminfo before 'malloc'ing
Date:		2007-03-24 10:36:40
From:		mulyadi_santosa
Response to: Parsing /proc/meminfo before 'malloc'ing
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

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Re: Parsing /proc/meminfo before 'malloc'ing
  2008-11-17 22:35:39  dee_ [View]
  
  
  
  Hi Mulyadi,
  
  Thanks for this great article. It is really helpful.
  
  I am facing one problem. I want that my application should be able to find two things:
  1) available heap memory
  2) largest block of heap memory that it can allocate.
  
  Calculating available free pages and available user space will help me how?
  Can you help me in this?
  
  Regards,
  Deepak
  
  
• Re: Parsing /proc/meminfo before 'malloc'ing
  2008-12-05 20:12:08  santosam [View]
  
  
  Hi Deepak
  
  Sorry, I know no built-in glibc function that is able to do what you ask. Seems like you have to parse /proc/the-pid/maps by yourself and from there determine the largest VMA block you can allocate.
  
  Pay attention that you could split the size you ask into smaller parts, since in real situation it's a bit hard to find big continous virtual memory area.
  
  Sorry if it doesn't help you a lot and thanks for reading my article. Glad you find it useful.
  
  regards,
  
  Mulyadi.