OSX squeak crash: maximal size of image?

My image has grown to 480MB and needs to grow still at least to the
double of that (using squeak for research on language, involving huge
language samples). I am now starting to get low-space notifiers, and
squeak crashing into thin air.

I am on OSX with 4G RAM, squakVM 4.2.4b1, squeak 4.2b -- is there a
hard limit on the size of the image? Is there a way for me to get
beyond that limit?

thanks,
Michal

On 02.10.2010, at 12:06, Michal wrote:

Edit the Info.plist inside of the VM.

SqueakMaxHeapSize is set to 512 MiB by default.

I'd be interested in hearing how much bigger you can make this - the theoretical limit is 4 GiB (unless you switch to the experimental 64 bit Squeak). I suspect it might work up to 2 GiB.

- Bert -

>> is there a hard limit on the size of the image? Is there a way for
>> me to get beyond that limit?

> Edit the Info.plist inside of the VM.
> SqueakMaxHeapSize is set to 512 MiB by default.

thanks Bert! My image is now happily at 620MB and growing.

> I'd be interested in hearing how much bigger you can make this - the
> theoretical limit is 4 GiB (unless you switch to the experimental 64
> bit Squeak). I suspect it might work up to 2 GiB.

I will let you know when I hit the next wall (and I will try the 64bit
VM)

Michal

Ok, I saw someone answer this, but let me comment anyway.

The mac os-x vm is set to 512MB from a historical viewpoint. When we used 1GB there was a tendency for the virtual memory manager to mapping it with a starting address of 2GB.
Before the VM was 32bit clean this would cause a crash.  However you'll find with a os-x carbon VM of 4.2.x or a 5.7.x  cocoa VM you should be able to allocate > 1GB
Now how much is a question?  

I'd like to see that if on an os-x machine that is running 10.6.x with a 64bit kernel if you can allocate a image > 3GB ?   Usually you run into issues when asking for a chunk of
memory upwards of 2GB because a 32bit operating system has memory mapped hardware interfering with a clean 32bit address space.


Obviously under the 5.7 VM running with a 64bit image you should be able to address > 4GB of memory in an image, but as far as I know no one has attempted this.
You are welcome to try?

On 2010-10-02, at 3:06 AM, Michal wrote:
--
===========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>   Twitter:  squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
===========================================================================

>> I am on OSX with 4G RAM, squakVM 4.2.4b1, squeak 4.2b -- is there a
>> hard limit on the size of the image? Is there a way for me to get
>> beyond that limit?
 
> Edit the Info.plist inside of the VM.
>
> SqueakMaxHeapSize is set to 512 MiB by default.
>
> I'd be interested in hearing how much bigger you can make this

In my experiments, the biggest value that SqueakMaxHeapSize will
accept is 1880000000. Anything above that will cause the OSX VM to
crash on startup.

Again, I would be very interested to hear ways around this, if any,
since all of our images here have now reached the 1.5-1.8G range and
cannot grow anymore.

Michal