On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 04:44:49PM -0800, B. James Phillippe wrote:
   > I was running an application with ElectricFence, and after about 10 minutes
   > of steady allocation, the machine just died.  I was not root, and the
   > application was not setuid root either.  My application allocates memory
   > many times, but does not have a large amount of memory allocated at any one
   > time (ie., there are alloc/free loops for testing certain functions).  It
   > runs with no problems w/out electric fence (and completes in a fraction of
   > a second), but stalls and consumes free memory (apparently endlessly) when
   > linked with efence.
   
   If I'm not mistaken, ElectricFence will never give the same piece 
   of memory to an app if the app does a malloc()/free()/malloc(). Meaning,
   an app that uses a bounded amount of memory without efence will use
   an ever increasing amount of memory with efence. 


i believe this is not true.  it *is* a possible way to run
efence but the default it isn't.