limit process total memory

[rtttech]

I need to limit the total memory of my program, does mimalloc support this feature?

[epoupon]

Note that you can also use ulimit to limit the memory of your process (and you can also tweak the kernel in order to prevent overcommit)

[daanx]

I also think that ulimit is best for processes.
However, if you want, you can have various options in mimalloc as well:

• use MIMALLOC_RESERVE_OS_MEMORY=1GiB to reserve memory, and also MIMALLOC_LIMIT_OS_ALLOC=1 to not allow further OS allocation. (you can set this programmatically too at the start of your program using mi_option_set and mi_reserve_os_memory).
• use mi_reserve_os_memory_ex to reserve an exclusive arena, and then create per thread a heap with mi_heap_new_in_arena and set it as the default heap (with mi_heap_set_default) -- such heaps will only use memory in the reserved arena. This is used in Koka to have a compressed 32-bit heap by not initially committing the reserved arena (so it reserves address space but commits on demand).

Hope this helps, -- daan

[rtttech]

Our application runs on windows, linux, android, and other limited env, and has disk file cache which can been freed when total memory reach the up limit. @daanx @epoupon