Thus spake Alson van der Meulen: > On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 06:37:18PM -0400, Avdi B. Grimm wrote: > > 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. > Tried 2.4.12? 2.4.10+ kernels are supposed to have a better handling for > this kind of situation. > > > > 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. > Reminds me of early 2.2 kernels, they usually panicced in such kind of > situation :(
I had the same kind of experience with 2.4.8 - upping to 2.4.10 a few
weeks ago took care of it for me.
Good luck,
Steve
--
I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks.
-- Totie Fields
pgpx37n7ndse7.pgp
Description: PGP signature
