Malloc Problems with DECstation 5000/200

[Ian R. Searle]

Hello, as it turns out I have "sort-of" solved my own problem, but
I would still like to hear from anyone who can explain the remaining
puzzle.

The problem of a single process size not growing beyond 60-70
Mbytes when we have 157 Mbytes of swap was due to the parameters
in /usr/sys/conf/mips/NODE-NAME (configuration file). Specifically
maxdsiz was set to 64. Upping this to 128 and rebuilding the kernel
solved our problems, sort-of.

We still cannot malloc a single chunk of memory larger than 32
Mbytes when using the standard malloc. When we link with -lmalloc
we can get up to 128 Mbytes (the value of maxdsiz). Why the diff??

thanks in advance, Ian Searle.