Memory Problems and crashing

Question

I recently purchased a Mac Pro 2 x 2.26 Quad Core (Octocore) with 12GB RAM mostly for producing and recording music. I mostly use an application called Ableton Live. It has been constantly crashing and giving me "out of memory" errors. I have a support ticket in to Ableton, but I think maybe this is a RAM issue or something. I looked at the console and I am getting these messages:
5/10/09 11:56:26 AM [0x0-0x11e11e].com.ableton.live[7632] * error: can't allocate region
5/10/09 11:56:26 AM [0x0-0x11e11e].com.ableton.live[7632] terminate called after throwing an instance of 'St9bad_alloc'
Any ideas?

Answer 1

On Ableton's website there appears to be a few issues with this software on an 8 core system.
My suspicion is that it might be an issue with the software on a multi cpu system.
*A few questions/experiments:*
- What version of Abelton Live are you using?
- Try 1 CPU core, single threaded
- Try disabling NUMA
- Try physically removing 1 CPU from the system leaving 1 CPU in a socket.
Be careful not to bend any pins on the CPU socket as the whole CPU socket may have to be
replaced if damaged.
Details
A Nehalem system has the option of being a NUMA system meaning that applications use memory local to it's CPU socket. If possible, you can try disabling NUMA. I'm not sure if there is a way to do this or not (probably a BIOS option). Switching to a single CPU socket will also help point to whether this is an issue or not.
I believe that the address range indicated in the post is usually a range that can't be allocated. This range around address 0x0 is usually used for the IDT in real mode. This is a table that points to where the interrupt handlers are and wouldn't be available to an application. The O/S may be able to reclaim the memory region though if it moves the table someplace else (speculation).