Re: Cron jobs run out of memory?

[Jacob S <stormspotter@6Texans.net>]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 01:35:12 +0800
Uwe Dippel <udippel@uniten.edu.my> wrote:

> On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 15:50:10 +0100, Jacob S wrote:
> 
> > $ free
> >        total       used       free     shared    buffers  cached 
> > Mem:  516308     514288       2020          0       1712  101836
> > -/+ buffers/cache:410740    105568 
> > Swap: 497968     467868      30100
> 
> This is simply too little of free memory to expect reliable behaviour.
> Try to get more memory (RAM or larger swap) and come back if it
> doesn't work. I almost bet it will.
> 30 k plus 2 isn't enough for crond plus your script.

I should have mentioned - I have gotten this error with 768MB of ram
installed before too. How much ram do I need before I have "enough"?
Since it's running in the middle of the night, and is the only cron job
running at that time, I would have expected the system to find some
memory that it could free up somewhere. 

Also, to help my learning... How is cron treated differently enough that
it runs out of memory, but I can leave my computer running for a month
and all that time the script runs manually from the CLI without a hitch?
(Galeon, Firefox, Gaim, Xmms and Xine are all running perfectly as
well.)

Thanks,
Jacob