Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 46
GV causes memory exhaustion
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:48 EDT
System description: RedHat 5.1 with all updates, XF86SVGA server with Matrox Millenium II PCI card, 128MB SDRAM, 4GB HDD, AMD K-6 266 CPU, generic Gigabyte TX mboard. X is running in 1024x768, 32 bpp. Started `gv'. Opened a 10 page PS doc. Selected a (big) section of the displayed page with the middle mouse button and clicked on `64' with the right mouse button on the submenu that appeared. X displays that little stopwatch cursor and _everything_ freezes for one or two minutes, the system swaps heavily in the meantime. After swap and memory is exhausted, gv quits. Here's the error message: -------------------------------------------------- XIO: fatal IO error 12 (Cannot allocate memory) on X server ":0.0" after 8093 requests (8092 known processed) with 150 events remaining. /home/vlad/devel/3475>$ [2]+ Exit 1 gv -------------------------------------------------- I can probably reproduce this as many times as I want, although tried only three times. I suspect that it is an X server bug which is only triggerred by certain action such as the one in GV.
Well, then, don't do that. :) Seriously, gv is trying to expand whatever you select to 64x its size and let you scroll around in it. That's *going* to take a huge amount of memory, especially if you select the whole page.