I am currently running monetdb (release Oct2010)  on Debian etch, with 8GB physical RAM and 10GB virutal memory. During unrestricted operation (using the merovingian daemon) monetdb takes up a significant majority of the resources, which is not desirable as there are other processes running on the same server. To limit the memory, I tried using ulimit (setting -d, -v and -m all to 2GB). According to the logs, merovingian notices the limit (a line from log states "Found 1.907 GiB available main-memory"). However, memory usage of mserver still exceeds that limit and is killed off by the OS, abandoning an ongoing query. (merovingian is not killed and mserver restarts without any problems). Is this expected behaviour or is it a bug?

Is there another way to limit monetdb's memory usage?

As a note, none of the tables (and therefore none of the columns) are anywhere near 2GB in size. The biggest table has ~2.5M rows, where each row has 2 columns ( 8byte bigint and 4 byte int). However, there are thousands of tables, and mserver exceeds the limit most often when a large number of tables are being updated within a short time (in a single php process, however). Is it possible that mserver doesn't release memory fast enough to allow multiple tables to be accessed? 

Thanks.