Re: fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed

[Alan Larkin <nobrow@eircom.net>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Alan Larkin wrote:
>> Its not a huge push Im trying to do here (<about 150Mb) but always malloc fails!
> 
> Any huge objects?
> 
> Also, it might be interesting to run it under gdb, and put a breakpoint on 
> the "die" function, so that it stops where it runs out of memory. Then. at 
> that point, you can:
> 
>  - do a "where" in gdb to see what allocation it is (and ask it how big 
>    it was by printing out the value of "size").
> 
>    It may be something totally uninteresting (just some random object that 
>    happened to push things over the limit), but statistically, malloc 
>    failures tend to happen to big objects, and sometimes just because 
>    somebody needed a huge area that won't fit in the virtual address 
>    space.
> 
>  - check with "ps" what the size of the process is. Maybe you even just 
>    have some process limit set that causes brk/mmap to return failure 
>    earlier than necessary..
> 
>    (It can also be interesting to look at /proc/<pid>/maps, in case
>    there are big mmaps that fill up the VM etc)
> 
> Sometimes it's also a good idea to have a swap file.  You may not even
> *need* to actually page, but it gives thew VM layer much more freedom,
> especially if your distro has set the flags to disable memory "overcommit".
> 
> 		Linus
> 
> 

There were a couple of big files. I removed a 72Mb one (making 47Mb the biggest one left in the
project) and made the push and it worked. I later pulled the project down to a different machine,
added the 72Mb file back in, and pushed to the server and it worked. So apparently it's a platform
specific problem. If anybody's particularly interested I could replicate it under gdb and pass on
any info, but if not I wont ... job's done, Im happy.