On Oct 27, 2009, at 9:35 PM, Joel Seidman wrote:
Thank you for your response. Since I'm on a 64-bit computer I was
hoping
that 2 would not be an issue, but it appears it is.
The size of a pointer is not the only limitation on the amount of data
an application can allocate - "anonymous" pages (pages that don't
permanently live in a file, such as stack pages and pages allocated by
the standard memory allocator) have to have *something* backing them
up when they're not in main memory; that's what a swap partition (on
many UN*Xes) or the swap files/page files (some UN*Xes, such as Mac
OS, and Windows) are for.
If, for example, you have a swap partition, and you attempt to
allocate more virtual memory in a process than will fit in main memory
+ the swap partition, that attempt will fail.
