[Haskell-cafe] Slow IO

[Jared Updike]

> Maybe I've misused the word segfault.
> What happened is:
> The programme consumed more and more memory (according to top),
> kswapd started to have a higher CPU-percentage than my programme,
> programme died, system yelling 'Speicherzugriffsfehler', top displays
> 'kswapd<defunct>'.
> I believe that means my programme demanded more memory than I have available
> (only 256MB RAM + 800MB swap). Is that a segfault or what is the correct
> term?

I thought a segfault was when a program reads or writes to protected
memory (for example, out of bounds on an array, or dereferencing a
null pointer, etc. things mostly avoided in Haskell). Luckily there
are lots of fun ways to crash computers! I've heard your "heap
overflow" called "exploding" because of how the process rapdily
expands its memory usage, filling all available space, causing system
collapse.

  Jared.
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