Re: memory crash

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Wed, 11 Dec 1996 22:24:00 +0000 (GMT)

> Under certain circumstances, the shell gets swapped out to make space for
> the offending program, and cannot be swapped back to enforce ulimits. So
> ulimits won't work. (This is the case on my machine, when I thought I
> would be so smart to setup the ulimits fairly conservatively).

Wrong. Ulimits are handled by the kernel

> > 2. What should be done to insulate the system against this kind of thing?
> away. (eg Imagine 200 meg Gaussian problems running on a system with 64
> meg... apparently a lowly microVax can handle this but not Linux.)

Not my uVax wouldn't. Linux is bad at some specific pathalogical cases
typically found in massive compute jobs. On general usage its better than
most other setups I've tested. (Of course objective as opposed to apparent
performance when paging can be hard to assess)

Alan