On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:25:20 -0500, Jon Hylands <jon at huv.com> wrote:

>I'm getting a weird problem, and its been so many years since I saw
>this, I'm at a loss as to what to do...
>
>On my robot Brainbot, I have a 2.83 GHz Core 2 Quad with 2 GB RAM and
>a 32 GB solid state HD. It is running Windows XP Pro.
>
>I'm getting a Low Space Notifier whenever I try and copy text to the
>clipboard, or when I try and paste. I can do other development things,
>writing a saving code, and opening browsers and windows with no
>problems.
>
>Task Manager says Squeak is taking up 37,980 K, and the machine has
>1.2 GB of free physical memory.
>
>I'm running the following VM:
>
>Squeak 3.10.6 (release) from Aug 30 2007
>
>And the following image:
>
>Squeak 3.10.2
>latest update: #7179

Okay, so this is still bothering me, and I dug a little deeper, and
came across something that blew me away...

http://www.huv.com/Clipboard-OutOfMemory.png

Basically, when I do 'copy', the primitive returns a ByteString that
is 4 billion bytes long -- 2^32 - 1 to be exact. Clearly that is not
really allocated, because even when I have this inspector open, Squeak
is still only taking about 37 MB of memory.

However, the method String >> #withSqueakLineEndings is trying to
create a new string that is 4 billion bytes long, and that is where I
run into the low space warning.

Primitive 141 appears to be causing the issue.

I'm not much of a VM person, so hopefully someone who is can look at
that primitive and figure out what case is causing it.

One more thing to note - I'm running Windows in a Remote Desktop, from
a Linux machine. To clarify, my development machine is a desktop,
running Ubuntu linux. The robot is a mini-itx running Windows XP Pro.
I use remote desktop from linux to access the Windows GUI on the
robot.

Later,
Jon