🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <KITTU.93Jan11095743@shakti.shakti.wpd.sgi.com>, kittu@shakti.wpd.sgi.com (Krishna Kolluri) writes:
|> >>>>> "Mark" == Mark Rosenstein <mbr@bellcore.com> writes:
|> 
|> 	Mark> I have an application that is killed (I assume by the
|> 	Mark> OS). I wanted to try and figure out what was going on
|> 	Mark> using the casevision debugger.  I was unable to figure
|> 	Mark> out a way to catch the kill, and when the program
|> 	Mark> mysteriously dies, all I get in the debugger is process
|> 	Mark> xxxx: terminated.
|> 
|> 	Mark> Is there a way to catch the kill signal with the
|> 	Mark> casevision debugger?  With other signals (like INT) when
|> 	Mark> set it in the signal panel, and then send the
|> 	Mark> application (attached process) an INT, it happily
|> 	Mark> catches it.  And I can look at the stack, etc, etc.
|> 
|> 	Mark> When I set SIGKILL in the signal panel, and then send
|> 	Mark> kill -9 xxxx, the process just terminates. [This also
|> 	Mark> happens when the OS does it to me].
|> 
|> 	Mark> Have I missed something?
|> 
|> Sounds like your application is leaking memory, and is running out of
|> swap space. Check your console window if this is what is happening.
|> 
|> If so, you should link your application with libmalloc_cv.a and turn
|> on malloc/free tracing in the Performance Panel. Then bring up Heap
|> View and see where you are leaking memory. If you need help, let me
|> know. 
|> 
|> kittu..
|> 

It may seem non-sequiter (sp?) but here is a piece of information missing
from Kittu's reply.  IRIX 4.0.X does not preallocate Virtual Memory pages
for programs.  VM pages are allocated whenever a process reads or writes
to a particular page of memory for the first time.  It is possible that
the system will run out of virtual memory (real memory + swap) when a
memory reference is made.  If this occurs, the process will be killed.

The most common causes for this are programs which have memory leaks so
the size of the process keeps growing.  Some rather ill behaved programs
keep allocating memory until they run out so they can decide how much
memory they'll have to play with.  This strategy only works if the pages
are preallocated.  Your IRIX kernel can be reconfigured by changing the
value of availsmem_accounting to 1 in /usr/sysgen/master.d/kernel and
then running /etc/autoconfig and then rebooting.

If the program is ill-behaved when it comes to it's use of dynamically
allocated memory, Kittu's suggestion of doing malloc/free tracing may
help point out the hogs in you program.