help for "Killed"

[Malcolm Wallace]

Dean Herington <heringto@cs.unc.edu> writes:

> I have a program that dies, saying simply "Killed".  How can I tell what
> that means?

It means that the operating system (Linux probably?) has terminated your
program.  One thing to check is your ulimit settings, which can place a
bound on the amount of resources (time, memory, etc) a process may use.
e.g.

    $ ulimit -a
    core file size (blocks)     0
    data seg size (kbytes)      unlimited
    file size (blocks)          unlimited
    max locked memory (kbytes)  unlimited
    max memory size (kbytes)    unlimited
    open files                  1024
    pipe size (512 bytes)       8
    stack size (kbytes)         8192
    cpu time (seconds)          unlimited
    max user processes          2048
    virtual memory (kbytes)     unlimited

Another possibility is that your program extends the heap until the
entire virtual memory on your machine is exhausted, which also leads
the OS to kill it.  Check whether this is the case by monitoring
memory usage using 'top' or 'gtop' or something.

Regards,
    Malcolm