Out of memory?

[Don Lee]

I got the following just now:

 

+  Executing Rebuild at 4/28/12 (Activity Thread 2)
To Backup Set iCompute11 [001]...
SixOneTree:TAddAbstractFile failed objects.nib
!Not enough application memory
4/28/12 3:08:39 PM: Execution incomplete
Completed: 326998 files, 19.9 GB
Performance: 233.3 MB/minute
Duration: 01:26:27

 

This is an 8 GB machine.

 

I have 2 VMs running, and another catalog rebuild running at the same time,and looking in Activity Monitor, there was almost no "free' memory at the time, but the rebuilds (one tape, one disk file set) were not that large - about 400-500K files, 70 GB data - each.

 

(config: Retro 9.0.2.107, Mac Mini, 8 GB memory, VMware fusion on same machine with 2 VMs (one 1 GB and one 2GB config) Mac OS X 10.6.8.)

 

Is this normal?

 

I'll try again. Maybe doing one at a time is a better bet.

[Lennart_T]

looking in Activity Monitor, there was almost no "free' memory at the time

What else is running or has been running?

Safari, for instance, is a real memory hog. And not all memory is freed when Safari quits.

 

Activity Monitor may give you a clue. Show all processes and check the real memory usage (not the virtual memory usage).

[Don Lee]

The trouble with virtual memory is that all the statistics you get with the various tools don't tell you where in the code someone decided that there is not enough.

 

I don't think it was Safari - it wasn't running. I also don't think it was actually "out". There are a number of categories for memory in Activity Monitor. There is the "locked" red memory, the yellow "active", the blue "inactive" and the green "free.

 

At the time of the failure, there was no green, but probably 5 GB of "blue" (inactive). I believe that the "inactive" is mostly the system cache - ready o be freed at a moment's notice.

 

I think it is much more likely that there is a Retro bug in there where some bad calculation or garbage number is calculating the required memory in the terabytes, and when requested, it fails. I ended up running one of these twice, nd they failed at exactly

the same point - at the end of the first tape.

[Lennart_T]

I'm still wanting to get a screen shot of the list in Activity Monitor, where it shows all processes and sorted by real memory usage. Like this:

 

Tip:

http://osxdaily.com/...-purge-command/

[Don Lee]

The failure takes hours to repeat, and the "out of memory" error comes up quickly, and is gone. I don't think I saw any memory symptoms beforehand. I'm not sure I could get that screen shot, even if I were willing to try.

[prl]

If you run Activity Monitor while the rebuild is going on, with processes sorted by memory use decreasing, you can just look at it every 5-10 minutes and see which processes, if any, are consuming large amounts of memory.

 

In my opinion the virtual memory use is probably more relevant to this problem than the real memory use. Except in some Java VMs, "out of memory" when you try to allocate more memory for a process generally means "out of virtual memory", or "address space exhausted" (process grown bigger than the addressing range of the processor). Is your Mac a PPC, Intel 32-bit or Intel 64-bit?

 

How much spare space to you have on your system disk? Does that change significantly as the rebuild proceeds?

[tgfn]

to free inactive memory you might use the purge command in the terminal

[prl]

to free inactive memory you might use the purge command in the terminal

According to the manual entry, purge only clears the disk cache. It doesn't sound like it affects any other inactive pages (like dirty pages belonging to processes that are no longer in the working set).

 

And anyway, I don't think that the problem is to do with real memory allocation.