Re: Memory warning from Emacs? BSD 4.0/Alpha

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:38:38 -0700
Chris De Young <chd%chud.net@localhost> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm new to NetBSD, so I apologize in advance if this is a FAQ - a
> search through the mailing list archives didn't seem to turn up
> anything enlightening.
> 
> I have a new installation of NetBSD 4.0 on a DEC Alpha, and by and
> large everything seems to be running as expected.  However, whenever
> I start Emacs (in character-cell mode, 'emacs -nw') and from time to
> time during an editing session it gives me a warning: "Emergency
> (alloc): Warning: past 95% of memory limit".
> 
> According to "top" there seems to actually be plenty of memory
> available:
> 
> Memory: 83M Act, 6088K Wired, 22M Exec, 27M File, 370M Free
> Swap: 138M Total, 138M Free
> 
> I get the error regardless of the size of the file I'm editing, and
> even when editing/creating a new file.  Despite the warnings, the
> editing session itself seems to work correctly - I haven't had
> anything actually crash yet.
> 
> Does BSD allow per-user quotas on virtual memory perhaps, a la VMS?
> Where should I look to find what limit I'm bumping up against?
> 
Look at 'ulimit -a' output.



                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb