Re: initdb fails on Centos 5.4 x64

valentin(dot)hocher(at)kabelbw(dot)de (Valentin Hocher) writes:
> [ cPanel's "Shell Fork Bomb Protection" actually does this: ]
> ulimit -n 100 -u 20 -m 200000 -d 200000 -s 8192 -c 200000 -v 200000 2>/dev/null

Just to annotate that: some experimentation I did confirms that on
RHEL5 x86_64, PG 8.4.3 falls over with the mentioned error when run
under ulimit -v in the vicinity of 200000 (ie 200MB). It's kind of
surprising that initdb eats that much virtual memory space, although
certainly loading all the encoding translation libraries simultaneously
is a bit of a stress test. But the actual memory footprint is surely a
lot less than that. Apparently there is a good deal of inefficiency in
address-space consumption when loading a bunch of .so's on this
platform. I'd be interested to know if people can reproduce similar
problems on other Linux variants.

regards, tom lane