On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Ian Kent <ra...@themaw.net> wrote: > A daemon shouldn't run out of memory. Generally speaking, it's an > > exceptional condition that justifies abnormal termination. > > Don't think it being a daemon makes any difference? > > I'm not entirely sure how this works but I thought that modified pages > are written to swap. If swap fills up I think alocs can fail even though > heap is available. If that is then fixed by external intervention the > alocs could then succeed. So, maybe termination isn't the right chioce > here. In any case it should be evident from the log that the situation > exists and the admin can decide what action to take. OTOH if heap is > really exhausted then termination probably is the right choice. > > In any case I prefer to try and continue.
Sorry, I just don't understand why that's the right thing to do. If a daemon can't allocate memory in order to perform the operations that it needs to perform, then how can it provide the functionality that it's expected to provide? Why should it continue indefinitely instead of aborting and being restarted automatically?
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