Out of Memory

I am running  perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.6 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
(with 2 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

on a MacOSX 10.4, dual cpu with 2GB of RAM and 230 GB free on the drive.

I am getting the following from a well tested program as I scale the problem up for a data processing problem.

perl(2013) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=8421376) failed (error code=3)
perl(2013) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
perl(2013) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Out of memory!

I know exactly where I can short circuit inside a major loop, which causes the error to occur or not, and the error occurs at the same point in my data stream (it is not the data--have less powerful linux machine running fine) every time. The next line following my early break in the major loop is another push(@array,$something). About 1GB RAM is used as the program spins up and reads in all external data. VM grows to about 1.4-1.5 GB, which does surprize me. I do not have permanently growing arrays--each time the major loop is done data is written to a file and arrays cleared. As the process does its thing, RAM for the process actually diminishes and VM grows.

With this much machine, I should not have memory problems at this level. Have I hit the wall with perl? Do I need to "tune" the machine to get into much much larger memory usage. Advice on how to pursue this mater further.




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