Joachim Durchholz
What I really want is the amount of memory my application can allocate and excercise lively without causing thrashing. On my Linux computer, that amounts more or less to the installed, physical RAM, minus a bit, so I'll settle for that. :-)
An easier way would be to make this a configuration option at installation time - the justification being that users probably have a better idea of how much RAM should be allowed to the program.
Actually, there is currently a parameter to use at run-time. The problem is that it is a time/space trade-off; if this parameter is set too conservatively, the program will be unnecessarily slow, if too liberal, the program will thrash, giving you on average about 5% CPU. In this case, it's better to crash early with OOM. (And the optimal setting depends on the data -- not just data size.) So the point of this excercise is to attempt to automatically determine a reasonable default. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants