[Warren Young <warren@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy Harris wrote:
> 
> Gerald mentioned (if it's a "running out of swap space" problem, some
> programmer probably needs to be gently encouraged to check the result of
> "malloc()" for NULL - and preferably report "sorry, you're out of
> virtual memory" or "sorry, you're probably out of swap space" or
> something such as that - rather than driving on and dereferencing the
> null pointer).

g++ does seem to do this reliably.  We have a program that won't build
on certain platforms because the g++ for that machine runs the system
out of VM while building it.  g++ dies with a nice "out of VM" message,
never with a sig 11.

I'd bet on memory problems.  Run a good memory tester on the system. 
I'll bet it detects a flawed memory module.

-- 
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m