grep out of memory error

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 12:16:23PM +1000, Dragos Ionita wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> not sure that I'm in the right mailing list here, but I got myselft  
> the 6.1-RC1 amd64 iso yesterday and installed it.
> 
> I've got a minimum system running and just 10 minutes ago, I ran a  
> 'grep' command and it returned an "out of memory" error.
> 
> The command run was:
> 
> grep -d recurse sasl /*
> 
> The error caused:
> 
> swap_pager: out of swap space
> swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
> HOSTNAME kernel: pid 618 (grep), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space
> Killed
> 
> Not sure, but this seems a bit odd; I've got one GB of RAM and 512M  
> of swap space allocated.
> 
> Running top beside the command gives you a nice view of what's  
> happening: All of the RAM is used up almost instantly and the the  
> swap space. All in all, in about 3 seconds, I get that out of memory  
> error.
> 
> Again, I'm not an expert in these matters, but it seems odd that grep  
> needs more than 1.5GB to grep (even if it's recursive from the root  
> dir).
> 
> Does anyone else experience that problem as well?

It's probably grepping /dev/zero, which is an exercise in futility.

Kris
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