mehdi@babel.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Mehdi Bonyadi) (09/29/89)
I wrote a program that creates a directed graph and traverses this graph to find the minimum and maximum cost paths. Any time a traversal ends a report of the edges and nodes is created dynamically. I am saving the top 100 ( user picks this number and there is no limit on it) of these reports. The problem I am facing is with memory usage. Once a report is put into the list and later needs to be replaced, I use the function "free" to free the memory. Well, it appears that free does not work and the memory is not freed. The reason being process memory usage goes above the limits and process dies. ( my database is quite large and I have to deal with it in one run and I can not break it down to smaller pieces so that I do not reach the limit. ) I am running this program on sun4 and sun3 workstations. An engineer from sun hot line told me about an existing problem with "free", he said it does not work in sunOS 4.0 and above ( he was not sure about previous releases of the OS ). I have a dealine to meet and I have been working on this program for over one year and ( it appears that ) none of my tests caught this problem. I guess I was counting on C in giving me the opportunity to use and release memory and I did not design a test case to make sure of that. If there is anybody who knows how to deal with this problem please let me know. If there is a work around or if there is another way of programming this thing, I am willing to do it. If someone has a memory management package that can allocate a big chunk and then work with its own malloc and free please let me know. I have time till Monday October second to solve this problem or ???????