Is there any way to easily limit a C/C++ application to a specified amount of memory (30 mb or so)? Eg: if my application tries to complete load a 50mb file into memory it will die/print a message and quit/etc.
Admittedly I can just constantly check the memory usage for the application, but it would be a bit easier if it would just die with an error if I went above.
Any ideas?
Platform isn't a big issue, windows/linux/whatever compiler.
Override all malloc APIs, and provide handlers for new/delete, so that you can book keep the memory usage and throw exceptions when needed.
Not sure if this is even easier/effort-saving than just do memory monitoring through OS-provided APIs.
Read the manual page for ulimit on unix systems. There is a shell builtin you can invoke before launching your executable or (in section 3 of the manual) an API call of the same name.
On Windows, you can't set a quota for memory usage of a process directly. You can, however, create a Windows job object, set the quota for the job object, and then assign the process to that job object.
In bash, use the ulimit builtin:
bash$ ulimit -v 30000
bash$ ./my_program
The -v takes 1K blocks.
Update:
If you want to set this from within your app, use setrlimit. Note that the man page for ulimit(3) explicitly says that it is obsolete.