On 8/31/2011 5:40 AM, Chris Withers wrote:
On 31/08/2011 13:33, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
I am using Linux desktops; both incidents were with Python 2.5. Do newer
versions of Python respond to this sort of situation more gracefully?
Ironically, Windows does better here and dumps you out with a
MemoryError before slowly recovering.
Linux seems to fair badly when programs use more memory than physically
available.
Linux virtual memory has some known design problems. For example,
you can crash many Linux systems with a program which opens large
files and accesses them randomly, combined with another program which
is spawning processes that need a fair amount of memory. The disk
caching system tries to use all unused memory, and when process
startup is consuming pages, it's possible to get into a situation
where a page is needed, the task requesting it can't block, and
a lock preventing freeing a file cache page is set.
Arguably, paging to disk is obsolete. RAM is too cheap and
disk is too slow.
John Nagle
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