Danny, On Saturday 26 February 2005 08:33, Danny Sauer wrote:
On Friday 25 February 2005 04:16 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote: [...]
(*) The one weakness I've experienced more than any other on my SuSE Linux system is its vulnerability to a rogue process consuming so much memory that everything else gets swapped out and it becomes impossible to even kill the errant process.
Clearly, you need more memory. :) Most modern system will accept 2GB, if not 4 or more. You should have time to kill acroread before it fills up 2GB of physical memory.
I have 1 GB. Brute force cannot be the right way to address this problem. Besides, a run-away program can easily consume all the RAM and start driving swap activity much more quickly than a human user could recognize the problem and attempt to stop it. In fact, by the time there is any indication of a problem, it's pretty much too late already. Furthermore, such processes often are not responding to the messages triggered by clicking the close box or typing ALT-F4, forcing one to run ps or activate the KDE System Guard process table attached to CTRL-ESC. And finally, the X11 process that mediates keyboard and mouse activity is affected, too, making any corrective action whatsoever impossible. The upshot is that this is a genuine vulnerability that cannot be solved by throwing memory at the system.
--Danny, noting that the kernel starts killing processes when it runs out of memory...
That might be helpful if I had no swap space, in which case the swap (or paging) activity that makes the system unusable would never occur. The simple empirical fact is that a process that exhibits extreme and unbounded memory consumptive behavior has one several occasions left me with no alternative but to press the mainboard's reset switch. Randall Schulz