Am 06.12.2013 16:26, schrieb fdecomite:
> Le_Forgeron <lef### [at] freefr> wrote:
>> Le 06/12/2013 15:41, fdecomite a écrit :
>>> Povray 3.7 on Ubuntu crashes as sson as it overpass 4giga of memory use.
>>> Won't it be possible to release this threshold ?
...
>> Have you check that your ulimit is not set to kill any process that use
>> more than 4 giga of memory ? (ulimit -m)
> unlimited

Are you absolutely sure about this?

I can't think of any mechanism whatsoever in POV-Ray that could lead to 
a hard crash at passing exactly 4GB of memory use.

If it was due to limited address space (i.e. a 32 bit version of 
POV-Ray), the crash would presumably at 2GB or 3GB, as the OS usually 
wants a chunk of the address space, too.

If it was due to some internal variable overflowing, the crash would be 
at a much more arbitrary limit, as it would affect only an individual 
data structure, with plenty of other data being around to take up 
additional space.

There is also no mechanism implemented in POV-Ray to monitor memory 
consumption (although such a mechanism would be useful at least on 
Windows machines, in order to prevent the system from entering swap hell 
when the physical memory limit is exceeded).


There is, however, that very mechanism in the Linux OS to forcefully 
limit the size of any user process, and if it kicks in it will do 
exactly what you see: Terminate the process hard.

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