Re: maximum value for HISTSIZE ?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Apr 2,  2:33am, Andy Spiegl wrote:
} Subject: Re: maximum value for HISTSIZE ?
}
} > There isn't a fixed maximum.  Zsh will try to use all the memory your
} > system will allocate to it to maintain as large a history as you ask.
} > When the memory runs out depends on your system.
} 
} Hm, okay. But an array with 318937 elements should easily be possible
} with 1GB RAM.

You're right.  Although the history can be arbitrarily big, an array can
only have 262144 elements.  I have no idea why that particular number --
it appeared sometime between zsh-2.4 and zsh-3.0, and prior to that an
array was IIRC effectively unbounded.  I don't have records of changes
between 1992 and 1995 ... not only was I busy starting my own business
then, but I was having a disagreement with some of the other developers
and had stopped using new zsh builds.

It's 1/4 of a megabyte, so an array of 262144 32-bit pointers would use
exactly a meg of memory.  Maybe that was/is related to the size of a heap
allocation block.

Perhaps Wayne remembers, or Zefram if he's still reading this list ...

In any case, it might nowadays be possible to increase the constant
MAX_ARRAY in zsh.h.