SLED and mlton

[Henry Cejtin]

We  hope for reasonable defaults to and I am trying to figure out why on some
machines, for some people, some  of  the  time  they  don't  work.   What  is
supposed  to  happen is that on start up MLton looks to see how much physical
RAM the machine has and sets the  maximum  it  will  ever  ask  for  to  some
fraction  of  that  (currently  85%).  Clearly this isn't really right if you
have other big processes running at the same time, but should be a reasonable
first  wack.  One problem is that if we ever ask for memory under this amount
and the OS says no, we exit instead of properly backing off.

Is the failure you observer repeatable?  If MLton  is  just  exiting  with  a
message about an mmap failing then it is just the known problem, and this can
be `fixed' by having more swap.  If it is  something  else  (like  it  starts
swapping  forever)  then  I would like to know how big MLton is trying to get
and how much RAM you have.