cannot run many programs simultaneously

[Anna Sidera]

When I said stop, I meant they stop running before finishing.

If increasing the swap space makes them vrey slow this will not help me. The reason I run 6 programms simultaneously is to save time.

Can you explain 'hit either the system over commit limit or actual exhaustion of memory'?

I will ask about this problem at the linux forum also.

Thanks,
Anna

----- Original Message -----
From: "John S. Fine" <johnsfine@verizon.net>
Date: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 7:35 pm
Subject: Re: cannot run many programs simultaneously

> As Ian already explained, you're asking in the wrong place, 
> because 
> there is no reason to believe this is a GCC issue.
> 
> The programming or linux-general forums at LQ would be a better 
> place if 
> this discussion needs a lot of follow up.
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/
> 
> But for now, I'll give the basic answer:
> 
> Anna Sidera wrote:
> > They run for some time and then they stop. However when I run 
> only 3 of them simultaneously, and then run the other 3, they all 
> finish successfully.
> >   
> The obvious explanation for that behavior would be you hit either 
> the 
> system over commit limit or actual exhaustion of memory.  Until 
> you rule 
> that out, you shouldn't look for any more obscure theory.
> 
> Either one of those (over commit limit or exhaustion of memory) 
> could be 
> dealt with by increasing the amount of swap space in the system.  
> If you 
> lack enough physical memory to run 6 of those processes at once, 
> increasing swap space would stop that from crashing, but might 
> just make 
> them crawl instead of crash.  (Depending on what you mean by 
> "stop", 
> that might already be what you are experiencing.  You may need to 
> explain "stop" better in order to get a better answer).
> > I do not know if it is a bug or a problem with the memory the 
> system allows me to use. The output of the ulimit -a command is 
> the following:
> 
> That isn't relevant.  No matter what ulimit allows each process to 
> use, 
> it can't allow the total of all six processes to use more than is 
> available for the whole system.
> 
>