Simulating less memory with ulimit

These days I was trying to reproduce a bug in Krita where it would crash when a user copied group layers between windows. It appeared that the user was getting a segmentation fault due to the user’s computer running out of memory.

I could not reproduce the issue, but my computer has 16 GB. The first thing that came to my mind was to create a virtual machine with less memory to reproduce the issue. But I decided to spend some time looking for a simpler way of doing it.

Searching the web I found some suggestions that ulimit could work. After playing for a while with ulimit and htop, and verifying the amount of memory necessary to open two files in two windows in Krita, I came up with the following settings.

# 2550 mb in kb
ulimit -v 2550000

# 2 gb in kb
ulimit -m 2000000

# Confirm limits
ulimit -a

gdb $HOME/Development/cpp/workspace/krita_install/bin/krita

Then after copying a few layers from one window to another, I successfully reproduced the issue, and could include a backtrace in the Krita issue tracking system.

♥ Open Source

Categories: Blog

Tags: C++, Krita, Programming, Opensource