On 1/28/10, nixlists <nixmli...@gmail.com> wrote: > Why kill random processes that may not be misbehaving and/or cause a > kernel panic when you want to kill the process(es) that leak memory or > are hungry in the first place? It's possible to avoid kernel panics in > this case IMO, and not kill random processes.
aren't you missing the point of original comment made by Otto? consider a situation, when all the processes in the system "are behaving", none of them violates their rlimits, but they all together have allocated more memory than the box contains (RAM + swap). so the OS needs to do something. what should it do? should it just panic? or may be losing one process is better than losing them all? then, what are the criteria for choosing processes to be killed?.. wondering if "random" means the process with PID 1 could be one of them...
