Tool for testing low-memory behaviour on linux

[fishpi]

Does anyone know of a tool for linux which allows you to test how an app behaves when it runs short of memory (i.e. when memory allocation starts failing)? I've managed to run this sort of test by messing around with the code of the app (introducing massive memory leaks, modifying malloc to randomly return null etc.), but I'd like something didn't need me to modify the code.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[markab]

We have been using Canned Heat - it isn't open source but it is freely available - which will thrown your system into certain states to test whether your application degrades gracefully under certain conditions, one of which I believe is unsufficient memory allocation. I am not sure if it is Windows only though, but certainly worth checking.

http://www.se.fit.edu/projects/CannedHEAT/Home.htm