as we know, running out of swap space causes the kernel to start
killing random processes, and every time this happens, a message
"Out of memory for <program name>" is logged. The problem is,
this doesn't tell me much which program actually used up all the
swap space (possibly because of a bug).
Here is my suggestion: in addition to the "Out of memory for ..."
message, there should be a process listing similar to "ps m" (or,
if that would overflow the syslog buffer - syslogd could be very
slow to read it due to heavy swapping - at least a few processes
which are using the largest amount of memory). This way, it
would be easier to track down the program (or luser :-) causing
the trouble.
(Of course it would still be nice if we can handle "out of VM"
situations more gracefully than we do it now, but this has been
discussed many times already...)
Comments?
Marek