kmself@ix.netcom.com wrote: > I've been kicking this issue around for a while and would be interested > in ideas for a low-memory monitor or something similar which would > identify high-utilization processes and kill them rather than bringing > the entire system to a crashing halt. > > Then there's always ulimit -- but this doesn't address the issue of > *system* resource saturation, only for a given user. > > I've also heard that FreeBSD handles low-memory situations more > gracefully tha GNU/Linux, thoughts?
linux already has this built into the kernel, called the OOM killer. the trouble is it is very very difficult to find which processes are using the most memory, i know it sounds weird that it should be easy but i remember reading a technical explanation why it was so hard on kt.linuxcare.com a couple months back. the OOM killer is getting better but it will probably never be perfect. it may not even be possible to have it be perfect. and btw i have had a freebsd machine run out of memory it locked HARD. it was obvious there was a process that was chewing it all(Unreal tournament server using almost 700megs of RAM, 768MB ram total, 0 swap at the time) one second it was fine the next it was dead. couldnt even ctrl-alt-del had to power cycle it (FreeBSD 4.0) so whoever said that freebsd handles low memory situations better...probably has enough ram/swap to not have it happen to them :) my desktop has 512MB ram and about 350MB swap.. of course i never see a OOM(out of memory) condition(running debian 2.2r1) check the archives on kernel traffic (kt.linuxcare.com) there has been quite a bit of discussion on the OOM killer in recent months. although i believe most of the developments are in the 2.3/2.4 series ... nate -- ::: ICQ: 75132336 http://www.aphroland.org/ http://www.linuxpowered.net/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
