> ...perplexing problem...
> The problem is that there seems to be a malloc ceiling of 16M, after which
> named complains that it can't malloc any more memory and crashes. ...
> ...the machine was swapping, but the test programs were also unable
> to malloc once they approached 16M.

I have precisely this problem, except that fitting additional physical
RAM above 16M is not an option for me since I use a 16-bit adaptec
SCSI adapter on my i486 NetBSD-1.1 machine.

The way the problem shows up for me is that when I run, e.g.,
ghostview under X, the ghostscript interpreter (gs) often fails with
BadAlloc errors when it needs to open some font whose description is
big. I thought at first that I didn't have enough swap space, but I
just increased my swap to over 70 meg(!) and I *still* have the
problem although some things do run faster than before. I really need
to be able to have big processes. It's not Un*x otherwise.

I add my entreaty to that of the original poster. HELP! Is there some
configurable per-user limit on the size of each process or something?
'apropos limit' and 'apropos memory' have told me nothing that I can
see to be of use. Thanks for any assistance!

	-- Robert Kennedy