Large programs core dumping upon execution

[paul.d.wolfson]

In article <211 at comhex.UUCP>, sysop at comhex.UUCP (Joe E. Powell) writes:
> Has anyone else ever noticed that very large (over 300K) files
> sometimes tend to core dump when they are invoked?  They usually
> work fine, but every now and again, the program will just refuse
> to start up.  Is it just me or have other people had this happen?
> 
> I've noticed this occasionally on nethack and moria, but more
> often with gcc (esp gcc 1.35).
> 
> I'm running 3.51a, with a 40 MB drive and 2.5 MB of RAM.
> 
> --
> Joe E. Powell
> unf7!comhex!sysop at bikini.cis.ufl.edu

I've been running umoria (4.85, all patches applied) for about two
years. I have just the basic system (20M HD, 3.5, 1Meg RAM).
Umoria has a few panic save routines to prevent you from losing
your character, but I haven't tried the latest version of Nethack.
With umoria, the few times it crashed (very few) I tracked down
to overindexing arrays, of all things. Some larger Unix machines seem to let you
get away with this to a certain degree, but not the unixpc. Umoria
is compiled with the -g option in the makefile, so just run sdb 
to find where in the code it's blowing up, or  With Nethack, check to see
of the -g option is used, and check the code for the overindexing problem.
I have found no indications of core dumps being caused by the unixpc,
itself, for any of the large games I've run.

Also, it's always a good idea to run lint on these big games. They
are usually writted for and run on the big mainframes on college campuses.
Most of them are written for BSD with hooks for SYSV. I'm not
sure where the unixpc fits in to these unix versions.. It seems 
to be a mongrel composed of
a little of both. Anyway, I've found some very strange things in the
lint output for some of these games, and lint output may give you some 
leads as to where to search for your core dump problems.

________________________________________________________________________
P. Wolfson