Question about process rlimits

[Andrew Duane]

I've been poking at some bugs we have around pushing user memory to/past the limits of our box, and decided to try seeing what happens on a stock FreeBSD system (7.1 in this case).

Basically I have a program that mallocs big memory chunks and zeros them to consume both physical and virtual memory. I had expected the program to stop malloc'ing when brk() reaches the process' RLIMIT_DATA (512MB cur and max). It didn't. It happily malloc'd many gigabytes of memory until I stopped it.

On our 6.2 based product boxes, RLIMIT_DATA correctly stops the malloc from continuing, just like the manuals say.

Am I missing something?

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Andrew Duane             Juniper Networks
978-589-0551             10 Technology Park Dr
aduane at juniper.net       Westford, MA  01886-3418