On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:49:02 +0200
Jan Danielsson <jan.m.danielsson@gmail.com> wrote:

> How can I increase the amount of memory an application can allocate?

The default memory limits set by the shells are conservative.
I found for instance that often firefox needs more.
I bump this up with:
ulimit -s 32768
ulimit -d 1048576
(for the bourne shell, limit for the csh) in the firefox startup script.
This can also be set in the shell startup files (see shell man pages
for file names, and other limits).