On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 11:42:57AM -0500, Mark Woodward wrote: > > "Mark Woodward" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> Still, I would say that is is extremly bad behavior for not having > >> stats, wouldn't you think? > > > > Think of it as a kernel bug. > > While I respect your viewpoint that the Linux kernel should not kill an > offending process if the system runs out of memory, I sort of disagree in > that OOM is a disaster preventor. It should be viewed as a last ditch "him > or me" choice the kernel needs to make and it should not get into that > position in the first place.
I've had processes run away on a FreeBSD box before, to the extent of running entirely out of swap and memory. Instead of random processes just dying for no apparent reason, I instead started getting a bunch of out-of-memory errors. No disaster, I just fixed the problem and life went on. Well, ok, the box did become rather unresponsive when my fix for the problem meant that all the sudden there were about 950 perl processes trying to run at the same time. I wish I'd captured top showing 900+ runnable processes. But after a few minutes the processes started completing and exiting and everything was soon back to normal. I rather doubt Linux would survive that... -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
