Bug 36863 – Setting a virtual memory limit of 256MB causes /bin/sort to immediately fail with memory exhausted

Bug 36863 - Setting a virtual memory limit of 256MB causes /bin/sort to immediately fail with memory exhausted

Summary:	Setting a virtual memory limit of 256MB causes /bin/sort to immediately fail ...

Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE

Aliases:	None

Product:	Red Hat Linux
Classification:	Retired
Component:	textutils (Show other bugs)
Sub Component:
Version:	7.1
Hardware:	ia64 Linux

Priority	medium Severity medium
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Assigned To:	Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
QA Contact:	Brock Organ
Docs Contact:

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Depends On:
Blocks:
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Reported:	2001-04-20 13:33 EDT by Henrik Grubbstrvm
Modified:	2007-04-18 12:32 EDT (History)
CC List:	0 users

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Fixed In Version:
Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2001-04-20 15:08:04 EDT
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oVirt Team:	---
RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Henrik Grubbstrvm 2001-04-20 13:33:05 EDT

sh-2.04$ ulimit -a
core file size (blocks)     1000000
data seg size (kbytes)      unlimited
file size (blocks)          unlimited
max locked memory (kbytes)  unlimited
max memory size (kbytes)    unlimited
open files                  1024
pipe size (512 bytes)       8
stack size (kbytes)         8192
cpu time (seconds)          unlimited
max user processes          8073
virtual memory (kbytes)     unlimited
sh-2.04$ sort
foo     
bar
baz
bar
baz
foo
sh-2.04$ ulimit -v 262144
sh-2.04$ sort
sort: memory exhausted
sh-2.04$ ulimit -a 
core file size (blocks)     1000000
data seg size (kbytes)      unlimited
file size (blocks)          unlimited
max locked memory (kbytes)  unlimited
max memory size (kbytes)    unlimited
open files                  1024
pipe size (512 bytes)       8
stack size (kbytes)         8192
cpu time (seconds)          unlimited
max user processes          8073
virtual memory (kbytes)     262144

Setting of the limit as above worked fine with the linux-2.4.0-0.43 kernel.

Comment 1 Arjan van de Ven 2001-04-20 15:07:59 EDT

this is a bug in sort; sort tries to allocate 2/3rds of physical memory 
regardless of what it is sorting

Comment 2 Bernhard Rosenkraenzer 2001-04-20 18:07:12 EDT

Used to, until we fixed it up a while before the 7.1 release.

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