Re: Memory allocation troubles

[Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev gmx net>]

Olaf FrÄczyk wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I write an application that requires much memory to run.
> It is impossible to assume that every time I ask for memory I'll get it.
> The application creates many threads (up to several hundreds) each
> thread taking about 0,6 MB.
> And when I am out of memory I could just wait for some threads to
> finish, and try again.
> Aborting program is not an option, because before dying I need to clean
> things up.
>
> As I understand, when I create a widget, add a timer etc. I allocate
> some memory. But in the API description there is nothing said that on
> return I should get NULL value or something.
>
> In other place I have found, that the glib library just aborts the
> program if it is unable to allocate memory. As gtk is build on top of
> glib, should I assume that there is no out of memory handling in gtk
> also?

While I'm unable to help you here, I'd like to note that running out
of memory is a generally bad idea according to my experience.  I once
had such a situation where my program under Valgrind consumed all
available RAM and swap and Valgrind bailed out.  After this, X server
had had problems with fonts till I restarted it (and their might have
been more little problems, don't remember.)

So, you might consider limiting memory usage of your program instead.
Or watch that there is still a "reasonable" amount of memory available
for the system (not sure how to do this, though.)

Paul