On 02-Jun-2000 Michiel Meeuwissen wrote: > > Already several times happened to me the following: > When I use a few memory eating programs like Netscape and dselect > together, by whole computer freezes for a long time (10 minutes or so) > and I don't see another way out then simply turning it of, because > then I at least know what happens, and how long it is going to > take. The freeze is not always complete. Moving the mouse can > sometimes move the cursor on the screen minutes later. Probably it's > not fair to call it a crash, but I do consider it like this. > > It seems that a way to accomplish this is running apt-get upgrade, > netsape and seti at the same time, in my computer (potato, PIII 500 64 > Mb). In the beginning sometimes I can see that 'xload' gets a few > ticks, and the load is very high, like 20 or 30. I think the memory, > including swap memory (128 Mb), is exhausted in such a case. It just > happened again with acroread and netscape running.
You should use "ps", "top" or "free" to see what processes run, how much memory is used etc. Have you compiled the magic-sysrec-key facility in the kernel ? If yes, were you able to use it for emergency-rebooting ? > So, I think this is very bad, since it should not be possible that one > or two programs hang the whole computer. > > What can be done about this? Does there exist some 'memory quota' > mechanism? I would e.g. like to see that netscape processes never take > more than 50 Mb of memory. Or perhaps there exist some program which > starts shooting of non essential processes (like those of *(@$&(! > netscape) when the load gets higher than 15 or 20 or so? You can force resource limits based on users/groups using the pam_limits.so module
