The default Linux Makefile (common/Makefile.machine.i686) uses /usr/bin/gawk
as the gawk interpreter.  To ensure correct working in UTF-8 locales run
/usr/bin/gawk --version and make sure it is at least version 3.1.5.
If not, it is recommended to install the latest version of gawk in
/usr/local/bin and update the GAWK variable accordingly.

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From:    Alex Franz <alex@google.com>
Date:    Fri, 06 Oct 2000 16:14:03 PDT

And, here are the details of the malloc problem that I had with the SRI
LM toolkit:

I compiled it with gcc under Redhat Linux V. 6.2 (or thereabouts). 
The malloc routine has problems allocating large numbers of 
small pieces of memory. For me, it usually refuses to allocate
any more memory once it has allocated about 600 MBytes of memory,
even though the machine has 2 GBytes of real memory.

This causes a problem when you are trying to build language models
with large vocabularies. Even though I used -DUSE_SARRAY_TRIE -DUSE_SARRAY
to use arrays instead of hash tables, it ran out of memory when I was
trying to use very large vocabulary sizes.

The solution that worked for me was to use Wolfram Gloger's ptmalloc package 
for memory management instead. You can download it from 

  http://malloc.de/en/index.html

(The page suggests that it is part of the Gnu C library, but I had to
compile it myself and explicitly link it with the executables.)

One more thing you can do is call the function

  mallopt(M_MMAP_MAX, n);  

with a sufficiently large n; this tells malloc to allow you to
obtain a large amount of memory.

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