System C Command and Memory Limit?

Question

Okay, so i am currently attempting to debug a problem on a win2003 server. Basically we have an ancient program that calls C's system() function. Now i basically tracked it down to the fact that when the system() runs the application. The application only has access to around ~500 or so megabytes of memory. Yet if i run the application manually myself, it runs fine.

Is there some sort of limiting factor on the system command and memory?

EDIT

Okay to elaborate more. We have an automatic processing system, that basically takes an input file and runs a bunch of applications on it. This has worked fine for the last 12 years or so. But now we are dealing with larger and larger images(Remote Sensing) using ArcEngine (ESRI Image Manipulation). Now we basically have the following:

Input file Comes in -> Gets picked up by processing system -> Executes a set of predefined tasks one after another by calling system().

Now when it comes to the ESRI Application the system the program crashes when attempting to read the image into memory. I cannot do anything about this by partially reading the image file, because this is how their sdk works. Also i just did a test by creating a veru simple C program that forcefullies allocates memory and seeing when it crashes. It crashes almost exactly around 512MB. I've looked around on the internet and cannot find anything. =/...

EDIT 2

I just did some funky tests. I basically wrote a small C program that calls the application via system(). And called that, it crashes in the exact same place. When i called this program the system had 2.5GB free memory(out of 3). I then basically wrote a python script that uses subprocess and popen and it worked fine. Adding the python script to the automatic processing system also runs fine.

What could possibly be doing this?

EDIT 3

Python script and the processing system both run as the same user. The only difference is the processing system runs as a service, logged in as a user.

Can you elaborate please, is the crash related to it only having access to 500MB of memory? — Yannick Motton
– Yannick Motton, Commented Sep 30, 2009 at 18:32
Did the python script run as a different user than the program in C? — Yannick Motton
– Yannick Motton, Commented Sep 30, 2009 at 20:31

Jim Mischel · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-30 18:48:32Z

2

You say that the program runs fine if you run it manually--outside of the automatic processing system. Can you modify the program so that it displays the amount of free memory periodically while the system is processing the image? If you get a free memory value before first calling the SDK, then you can determine how much memory the SDK is using when processing the image. If that turns out to be more than 512 MB (or whatever your limit is), then you know that the problem is with the SDK requiring more memory than what you have available.

If you can't break into the image processing, you'll need to create a timer proc that periodically displays the amount of free memory.

answered Sep 30, 2009 at 18:48

Jim Mischel

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Yannick Motton · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-30 18:54:59Z

1

There is no mention of any memory limitation to the spawned process when using system on msdn.

Which error code did the system call return? The out of memory return code is ENOMEM (12).

One thing to note however is that the use of system is deprecated, try running it with CreateProcess instead.

Edit: Another thing to check out is at what permissionlevel this application is being executed. Is the application run with the same user as the one you ran it with?

Edit2: You might also want to check Windows Job Objects as it can be used to limit the memory usage of a given job group.

edited Sep 30, 2009 at 18:54

answered Sep 30, 2009 at 18:41

Yannick Motton

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