How can a moderately sized memory allocation fail in a 64 bit process on Mac OS X?

Question

I\'m building a photo book layout application. The application frequently decompresses JPEG images into in-memory bitmap buffers. The size of the images is constrained to 10

Answer 1

Another guess, but it may be that your colleague's machine is configured with a stricter maximum memory per user process setting. To check, type

ulimit -a

Into a console. For me, I get:

~ iainmcgin$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) unlimited
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 256
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 1
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 266
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited

From my settings above, it seems there is no per-process limit on memory usage. This may not be the case for your colleague, for some reason.

I'm using Snow Leopard:

~ iainmcgin$ uname -rs
Darwin 10.6.0