Hi,

compiling Mozilla 1.0 I encountered the following error:

  cc1plus in malloc(): error: brk(2) failed [internal error]
  nsDOMClassInfo.cpp: cc1plus in free(): warning: recursive call.
  cc1plus in malloc(): warning: recursive call.

The last two lines repeated virtually endlessly (20 MB logfile) while the
memory consumption of cc1plus grew.

I repeated this and had top running at the same time. When the error happened
again, I saw this 'top' output:

  load averages:  1.26,  1.14,  1.09                                  19:57:34
  40 processes:  2 runnable, 36 sleeping, 1 stopped, 1 on processor
  CPU states: 21.0% user,  0.0% nice, 78.5% system,  0.5% interrupt,  0.0% idle
  Memory: 56M Act, 22M Inact, 488K Wired, 2000K Exec, 32M File, 4368K Free
  Swap: 101M Total, 16M Used, 85M Free

   PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  5008 heinz     63    0    34M   35M RUN        4:40 71.92% 71.92% cc1plus

Assuming 'top' output is somewhat to be trusted:

- The error message above (brk(2) failed) indicates a problem inside malloc().
  But at the same time I still see about 4 MB free memory and lots of free
  swap space. Am I too naive to expect the system to start putting pages
  onto the disk when running low on memory?

- Shouldn't the compiler (even a C++ compiler) die more gracefully?

Removing the '-O2' flag let the compiler run, although it used about the
same amount of memory (ca. 33 MB process size (SIZE and RES)). '-O' had
the same result as '-O2'.
Too bad that it's necessary to disable optimization on slow architectures.

ciao
     Klaus

PS:

NetBSD 1.6_BETA4 (GENERIC) #0: Tue Jul  9 04:02:40 UTC 2002
    autobuild@tgm.daemon.org:/autobuild/amiga/OBJ/autobuild/src/sys/arch/amiga/c
ompile/GENERIC
Amiga 3000 (68060 rev.1 CPU/MMU/FPU)
total memory = 98304 KB
avail memory = 88312 KB
using 627 buffers containing 5016 KB of memory