At the risk of great embarassment ... here's my program:
http://dekoppel.eu/tmp/pedupg.d As per Rick's first suggestion (thanks) I added import core.memory : GC; main() GC.disable; GC.reserve(1024 * 1024 * 1024); ... to no avail. thanks for all the help so far. Gerald ps. I am using GDC 4.9.2 and don't have DMD on that server