  We consider the occupancy problem where balls are thrown independently at
infinitely many boxes with fixed positive frequencies. It is well known that
the random number of boxes occupied by the first n balls is asymptotically
normal if its variance V_n tends to infinity. In this work, we mainly focus on
the opposite case where V_n is bounded, and derive a simple necessary and
sufficient condition for convergence of V_n to a finite limit, thus settling a
long-standing question raised by Karlin in the seminal paper of 1967. One
striking consequence of our result is that the possible limit may only be a
positive integer number. Some new conditions for other types of behavior of the
variance, like boundedness or convergence to infinity, are also obtained. The
proofs are based on the poissonization techniques.
