This is driving me nuts... every now and then, for one reason or another, some program(s) will gobble up all available memory (128MB RAM, 256MB Swap) and effectively freeze the computer. It's not a single, isolateable program, it's usually caused by something different each time. Sometimes it caused by starting a huge memory hog like NetBeans while there are several X sessions running. This last time it was because I accidentally told Konqueror to open up a few dozen large JPEGs at once, and it cheerfully started a few dozen instances of the image viewer program. My mistake, to be sure, but an easy one to make.
Now, I'm told the kernel (I'm running 2.4.8) has an out-of-memory handler which kills off memory hogs when the system runs out of memory. However, either it's not enabled, or it's idea of "out-of-memory" is a little different from mine. This last instance, the computer was utterly frozen. It did not respond to any input, not even Ctrl-Alt-Del. After a few minutes it wasn't even thrashing anymore, just hung. But no processes were automaticaly killed off. I wound up having to hard-reset. Back in my Mandrake days, I recall their being a daemon that was set up as part of a standard install, which as far as I could tell, did the following: sat in the background, and periodically requested various services from running daemons (like httpd). If the daemons took too long to respnd, indicating the computer was overloaded, it would start killing off misbehaving processes. Unfortunately, I can't recall the name of that daemon. So, my question is, is there some package available for Debian that will do the same job as that unknown Mandrake daemon? I'm getting sick and tired of having to hard-reset this thing every time it runs out of memory... reminds me too much of Win95. thanks, - Avdi Grimm
