On Saturday 26 February 2005 10:33 am, Randall R Schulz wrote:
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.
Maybe you have too much memory, then. The only machine I've ever had that problem with is a machine with 128MB physical and 512MB swap (and a particularly leaky server daemon, though I've yet to identify precisely which one - the machine's running SuSE 5.2 and really should just be updated, so I'm not investing time in fixing problems). :) Well, my 1.5GB machine hasn't had that problem, either. It must be you. :)
The upshot is that this is a genuine vulnerability that cannot be solved by throwing memory at the system.
Well, if you're gonna make this a serious response, how about by implementing per-process memory limits? man bash, search for ulimit - presuming you're using bash. The c shells have a similar command, named the same, IIRC. Set the memory limits, process limits, etc. It's up to the shell to enforce, but I'll bet bash will notice the problem well before the typical user would. --Danny, who doesn't set limits, largely because of laziness