> What ahppened is that I ended up have a gawk that was a script that called
> gawk, over and over. The machine would lock up around the 200 process
> mark.
>
> This is a Penitum Overdrive 83, 16 Megs ram, 16 megs swap. It's just a
> router/firewall/web server.
Simple: for every process started, the systmm allocates
8 kB kernel stack, one page directory, one (or more)
page tables and some inodes, etc...
All of this is unswappable and will fill up a 16 MB machine
quite fast, pushing everything else out to swap, which will
fill too.
With more swap the machine might just have survived; maybe
even without much trouble. I once ran 100+ sendmails on my
24 MB box, so your setup _should_ be possible.
Currently, Linux' out of memory handling is very, euhh,
non-graceful; I really should do something about it...
(part of the code is ready, I just don't know when to
kickstart the killing code)
Rik.
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Linux memory management tour guide. H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl |
| Scouting Vries cubscout leader. http://www.phys.uu.nl/~riel/ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html