Very large memory block.

[John Van Essen]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Dave Mielke <dave at mielke.cc> wrote:
> Using rsync-2.6.6, I'm getting:
> 
>    unable to alloc 417794083 bytes
> 
> Under what circumstances would rsync allocate a block that large? Must it be
> able to allocate a block as large as the largest file or something? Is there a
> way to limit it?

Rsync uses buffered I/O for file transfer - it does not allocate memory
based on the size of a file.

The size is not an even number, so it's not from an flist expansion or
any other buffer allocation.

Hmm.  That's not even a message from rsync.  Rsync reports:

  ERROR: out of memory in FOO

where FOO is a tag indicating where the problem happened (for example,
the name of the subroutine).

You need to provide more info - O/S, command used, what had happened
up to the error, etc.  Use -vv with rsync to get more info.

    John