On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Simon Burge wrote:

> Initially I'd guess it was a different problem.  Note that grep(1)
> will allocate memory for the contents of a file until it hits a \n,
> and obviously this doesn't occur for /dev/zero.  With two greps on
> /dev/zero, you'll very quickly get two processes trying to allocate
> a large amount of memory (128MB each on my -current i386).  How much
> RAM and swap does your box have?

  Yeah, this is definitely a memory problem.  It sounds like the machine
in question was under a significant memory load at the time of death,
which made me think it might be related.  I have 64MB of memory and about
100MB of swap, though I am fairly sure it died only halfway or so through
filling up the swap (from the last top update I got).

> The maintainer of GNU grep says that you should have enough virtual
> memory to allocate the longest line possible, and doesn't want to
> change that behaviour...

  It makes a great memory system torture test :).

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net