GC Warning: Header allocation failed: Dropping block.

[Yura Smolsky <info at altervision dot biz>]

Hello, java.

I am user of PyLucene lib. It's port of java Lucene library to Python.
And there is PythonThread which is really a wrapper around a Java/libgcj thread
that python is tricked into thinking it's one of its own.


My code creates like 10 threads of this type. Each thread has reference to
PyLucene's IndexSearcher object which size is very huge, like
400-800M.

When It creates many threads of this type and uses object
IndexSearcher then I receive following exceptions:
GC Warning: Header allocation failed: Dropping block
or
GC Warning: Out of Memory!  Returning NIL!

1. What does this errors mean?
2. When I decrease amount of threads to 2 or 3 then these exception
are gone. Why?
3. How can I specify the total size of memory which can consume gcj
threads or the whole process?

Thanks.

Yura Smolsky.