Per process memory limit?

[Kevin Brown]

I'm doing some NIDS stuff (Network Detection Intrusion System) and I've
encountered an interesting problem.  A cron job stops the NIDS once a day and
moves the logs.  I then transfer the logs to another box to convert the flat
text logs into crosslinked html.  The system it's doing the conversion on is a
dual PII 450 with 2GB RAM (used to be 512MB).  My problem is that the perl
script errors out with an Out of Memory message, yet watching top on the box the
process never exceeds 40% of the RAM and while there is a lot of cached data
there is nothing else on the system using more than 1% of RAM.  So the only
thing I can guess is that there is a per process limit on memory.  Do I have
this right and if so, how do I increase the limit?

Box stats

Dual PII 450
2GB RAM
2 RAID1 SCSI drives /
4 RAID5 SCSI drives /home /var
RedHat 6.2
kernel 2.2.16 SMP compiled for i686