memory usage overflowing accounting structure

[Derek E. Terveer]

I am running into a bit of a (minor) problem with the accounting on our
sun workstations...  We have a few users that are running simulations for
a long period of time and using up a lot of memory.  The accounting
structure, acct, defined in /usr/include/sys/acct.h, defines the member
"ac_mem" to be a short integer.  This is apparently not big enough for the
*average* memory used by these procs, 'cause its coming out as a negative
number in the accounting records.

Or am i doing something wrong?  Has anybody seen this before or know of a
way to get around the problem?  Is it safe to cast the short ac_mem into
an unsigned value and get the real number that way?  I tried that, but the
number looked *real* huge, and i wasn't sure if it was a valid number or
not.  I suspect that once its turned negative, the whole number will be
corrupted.

derek
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Derek Terveer 	    det at hawkmoon.MN.ORG || ..!uunet!rosevax!elric!hawkmoon!det
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