At 3:02 PM -0400 4/28/01, jack wrote:
>hi,
>
>i posted here a while back and had no success with the tips people gave
>me, so i am trying again.

Morning all. I traded a few notes with Jack about this in the last 24 
hours. Beyond finding out he has an icelandic keyboard on the 
powerbook, Jack discovered that if he changed the  default minimum 
size in the Get Info for memory size from 1000K to a much larger 
number then Squeak WILL run!


Now I suspect but he's not confirmed yet is that he doesn't have a 
lot of memory around (VM or real) or it's very fragmented, and the 
macintosh OS will look at the minimum size and slot him into a 1000K. 
Now the problem is that 1000K IS enough memory to start the VM 
startup code running. BUT it runs out of memory when it attempts to 
read the first 4 bytes of the image to figure out if the 6502 magic 
number is there. A few statements later it would of course attempt to 
allocate the chunk of memory for oldspace/newspace and fail with an 
out of memory error, so the error he is getting is related to memory 
but bogus. So in the next revision I'll change the minimum value to a 
larger number say 1500K which should startup the VM and get you to 
the point of failure for out of memory.


Of course if you have lots of memory around then the finder just 
gives you 20MB, which is why others couldn't recreate the problem.


Note for carbon users using the special Carbonized macintosh VM. The 
memory allocation pattern is very different. The carbon VM running 
under OS-9 will allocate memory upto the memory partition. Then 
backoff the allocation based on how much memory is free, then 
reallocate based on needs. So if you allocate say 40MB then you might 
find only 17.4MB is actually used.

The carbon application under OS-X will allocate a 1GB footprint, then 
back off, so you will find greater than 1GB mapped for VM storage, 
but say 17.5MB in use as the working set size. It will grow based on 
need but if you exceed the number of pages that can be stored in real 
memory then you get to discover how fast your paging device is. It 
won't crash, but it becomes very glacial in behavior.

Lastly

Hint. One needs access and a pointer to the V3.sources file. It's not 
obvious from the FTP site that a new user needs this too. Jack's last 
comment to me was he gets the error that the sources file can't be 
found.
-- 
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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