On x86_64 Linux, the memory arena is limited to slightly below 2GBytes

On x86_64 Linux, the total amount of memory used for data objects (the arena) is limited to 2GBytes, potentially causing failures when processing large data sets. A special-case handling (activated using the ./configure --with-large-arenas option) exists, but is only functional on the (obsolete) n64 SGI Irix architecture. There is no workaround.