Ok, I saw someone answer this, but let me comment anyway.

The mac os-x vm is set to 512MB from a historical viewpoint. When we used 1GB there was a tendency for the virtual memory manager to mapping it with a starting address of 2GB.
Before the VM was 32bit clean this would cause a crash.  However you'll find with a os-x carbon VM of 4.2.x or a 5.7.x  cocoa VM you should be able to allocate > 1GB
Now how much is a question?   

I'd like to see that if on an os-x machine that is running 10.6.x with a 64bit kernel if you can allocate a image > 3GB ?   Usually you run into issues when asking for a chunk of 
memory upwards of 2GB because a 32bit operating system has memory mapped hardware interfering with a clean 32bit address space. 


Obviously under the 5.7 VM running with a 64bit image you should be able to address > 4GB of memory in an image, but as far as I know no one has attempted this. 
You are welcome to try? 

On 2010-10-02, at 3:06 AM, Michal wrote:

> 
> My image has grown to 480MB and needs to grow still at least to the
> double of that (using squeak for research on language, involving huge
> language samples). I am now starting to get low-space notifiers, and
> squeak crashing into thin air.
> 
> I am on OSX with 4G RAM, squakVM 4.2.4b1, squeak 4.2b -- is there a
> hard limit on the size of the image? Is there a way for me to get
> beyond that limit?
> 
> thanks, 
> Michal
> 

--
===========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:  squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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