On 19-Nov-2007, at 16:50, Steff wrote:
Perhaps I'm living in utter innocence here, but my desktop/laptop systems have a swap partition of fixed size.
And they're set WAY too small, too, if it's windows. The old "2 times RAM" logic for swap files was never quite sane to begin with, and it's totally wack now. The whole swapfile/partition voodoo is just pure hate.
Also, would it be impossible to handle the error by emitting some thing along the lines of "for Jeff's sake delete something from $disk, I'm dying here" to stdout, stderr and anything else that springs to mind and periodically retrying the malloc rather than just dying?
From a shared library, the only options are aborting or returning a fatal error that the application should probably respond to by terminating. The application might try something clever, but the results are unlikely to make you happy. What happens when individual programs all try and deal with a system-wide memory shortage using their own clever algorithm is your "computer fletely, mouse and all" (STR).
