Per-process Memory Limits
A system may limit the amount of memory each process may use. This is usually a matter of policy but it can also happen when the OS has a larger address space than is available at the process level. Some high-end 32-bit systems come with 8GB or more of system memory, even though any single process can only access 4GB of it in a 32-bit flat memory model.
A process that exceeds its per-process limit will have attempts to allocate further memory, for example with malloc, return failure. A well-behaved application should handle this situation gracefully; however, many do not. An attempt to allocate memory without checking the result is known as an "unchecked malloc".
Read more about this topic: Out Of Memory
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