Randall R Schulz wrote:
Yes. That's my point. It's not an easy problem to solve for exactly the reason that there's just a continuum of legitimate needs which eventually become pathological (at different points for systems with different hardware capacity). What exactly characterizes pathological demand or load?
The "limits" are mostly to stop *server*-processes from going berserk (e.g. apache) - or shell-users (anybody remember the shell-accounts one got at university before the Windoze-desease spread?). The limits work quite well on shell-only accounts (no X). But with X (and qt et.al) apps have just been getting bigger and more power-hungry - so limits are of not much use and I can see why SuSE dropped them alltogether (can you say "support-nightmare"?). On my FreeBSD-box, it looks like this: rainer@bsd>limits Resource limits (current): cputime infinity secs filesize infinity kb datasize 524288 kb stacksize 65536 kb coredumpsize infinity kb memoryuse infinity kb memorylocked infinity kb maxprocesses 3618 openfiles 7236 sbsize infinity bytes vmemoryuse infinity kb But of course, that's comparing apples with oranges (or penguins with daemons).... cheers, Rainer -- =================================================== ~ Rainer Duffner - rainer@ultra-secure.de ~ ~ Freising - Munich - Germany ~ ~ Unix - Linux - BSD - OpenSource - Security ~ ~ http://www.ultra-secure.de/~rainer/pubkey.pgp ~ ===================================================