I can confirm this in general for every linux distribution I've ever
used. Any time I have a process that is both using 100% CPU and eats up
memory, the system becomes unusable as soon as it starts using swap. At
this point the hard drive starts thrashing and X slows to a crawl (the
pointer updates maybe every 30 seconds). My only options at this point
are to 1) hope the program finishes and gives some memory back, 2) wait
for swap to fill completely so the kernel will kill the program, or 3)
reboot the computer. The latter option is usually 5-10 minutes faster. I
think this is a very meaningful bug report, and one that I'd love to see
some attention given to, although I have no real idea what the solution
might be. The only workaround I've found is just to disable swap
completely (I'll bet your swap just wasn't enabled on your 32-bit box?).
Of course it's expected that things will perform badly when the system
is out of memory, but it's pretty rediculous that as soon as RAM is full
there aren't even enough resources for me to get to a console, log in,
and kill the program myself. It seems to me that if one program is
spending all of its time writing swap pages, there should at least be
plenty of CPU left over for me to operate the mouse, so it seems like
there's something else going on that causes the system to crawl..
So the question is: can we come up with a reasonable fix for this
problem, or do we just accept that any runaway process can crash the
machine? For the time being, I'm happy running swapless.
** Changed in: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
Status: New => Confirmed
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System freeze on high memory usage
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/159356
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