Out of memory: system();

[Ed K.]

I have fedora core2 installed with kernel: kernel-2.6.5-1.358

I must call system(....) about 300,000 times from a process that has 175MB allocated on a computer 
with only 256MB of RAM. But after about the 5,000th call, i get an out of memory error (errno: 12 
Cannot allocate memory) when I call the system function.

Anyone heard of this? is there something that I should free? why is my 'Committed_AS' at 3TB?

Here are the vitals:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 1
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1681.048
cache size      : 256 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts 
acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips        : 3325.95

$ cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:       256632 kB
MemFree:          3872 kB
Buffers:          5012 kB
Cached:          26764 kB
SwapCached:        720 kB
Active:         207140 kB
Inactive:        30656 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       256632 kB
LowFree:          3872 kB
SwapTotal:      131536 kB
SwapFree:       128856 kB
Dirty:              52 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         187252 kB
Slab:            11328 kB
Committed_AS: 3370872052 kB
PageTables:       1112 kB
VmallocTotal:  3874808 kB
VmallocUsed:      1752 kB
VmallocChunk:  3872736 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

ed

Security on the internet is impossible without strong, open, 
and unhindered encryption.