Re: sort's Large Memory Allocation

[Jim Meyering]

Thanks for the report.
There have been recent improvements on that front.
Please try the latest test release:
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/textutils-2.0.14.tar.gz

Mike Krebs <address@hidden> wrote:
| I have a problem with the recent version of sort not having enough memory
| when I use "ulimit -v 100000" in a shell script.  I looked at sort's
| source and I see that it was changed to allocate half of the available
| physical memory, rather than to allocate 512k (what it did it 2.0).
|
| So on my machine there is 1GB of physical memory -- with maybe 400MB free.
| Even with the patch installed (textutils-2.0.11-mem.patch), it will try to
| allocate 128MB.  But since virtual memory has been limited to 100MB (with
| "ulimit -v 100000"), sort can never get enough memory.
|
| I did notice that the "-S" option was added to sort, but this shell script
| (and therefore sort) is used across multiple platforms and multiple
| distributions, so using that is not a very viable solution.
|
| Can this be changed?  It seems like this behavior could cause a race
| condition if multiple sorts were run at the same time (or other such
| problems).  Or maybe there can be an "optimize for large files" switch
| that would enable this behavior?
|
| Thanks for any help you can give...