Re: Is the Ada run-time required to detect out-of-memory conditions?

From: Ludovic Brenta (ludovic.brenta_at_insalien.org)
Date: 05/21/04 

Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 19:13:36 +0200

Here are some more data points that seem to confirm my initial
assessment. The process was killed by the kernel when I had 256 MiB
of RAM and 256 MiB of swap. I created additional swap files so I now
have 256 MiB RAM and 4 GiB swap. I now get a Storage_Error after
approximately 192 million iterations.
Ada.Exceptions.Exception_Information outputs:

Exception name: STORAGE_ERROR
Message: heap exhausted

Here is the backtrace at the point where the exception is raised:

(gdb) bt
#0 0x40091950 in __gnat_raise_nodefer_with_msg ()
   from /usr/lib/libgnat-3.15p.so.1
#1 0x40091d18 in __gnat_raise_with_msg () from /usr/lib/libgnat-3.15p.so.1
#2 0x40091ab2 in __gnat_raise_exception () from /usr/lib/libgnat-3.15p.so.1
#3 0x40191e3b in __gnat_malloc () from /usr/lib/libgnat-3.15p.so.1
#4 0x08049a27 in test_250076 () at test_250076.adb:13
#5 0x0804978d in main (argc=1, argv=(system.address) 0xbffffce4,
    envp=(system.address) 0xbffffcec) at b~test_250076.adb:168
#6 0x401cddc6 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/libc.so.6

`top' indicates that the process takes 2940 MiB of virtual memory. I
think that virtual memory has indeed been exhausted; the limit is 3072
MiB (3 GiB) for all user-space programs, with 1 GiB reserved for the
kernel.

Now, 2940 MiB / 192_650_250 iterations averages 16 bytes per
allocation. Each Integer is theoretically only 4 bytes. So, while
libgnat does indeed reuse previously allocated pages, there is a
non-negligible overhead. Part of this may be due to the necessary
bookkeeping structures in the C library (malloc), but do you think
this might explain such a huge (4x) overhead?

If I remove the exception handler, I get the SIGSEGV:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x40228ee3 in malloc () from /lib/libc.so.6

Back to the original question, is this normal, or should libgnat turn
the SIGSEGV into Storage_Error? 

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

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