> Specs: PII-266 with 64m of RAM. 32m swap partition.
> Kernel version 2.1.126 (accidently compiled SMP on a UP machine).
>
> I had a bunch of apps open. Xfree86, netscape, gnome panel, gnome
> terminal, and after about 5 hours, the computer ran out of memory ( i
> presume, i couldn't tell.). I suspect the culprit here was a memory leak
> in one of the gnome apps, but that's not relevant.
[SNIP serious thrashing]
> Would it be possible to handle a low memory condition more gracefully?
> Killing the process which is using the most memory could be a good
> start.
There is a OOM killing patch on my home page; Andrea
Arcangeli and Linus are working on a patch that keeps
down the CPU usage of kswapd.
The part of Andrea and Linus is quite likely to get
into the official kernel soon (to soon, IMHO; see the
2.1.89 disaster for more info), my patch will wait
until 2.3 because we're in a code freeze right now
and I don't feel like pissing off Linus. If people
desparately want to have it in the mainstream kernel
now, they'll have to piss off Linus themselves or
apply my patch against every kernel they use -- whichever
is more convenient... :)
Rik -- typing slowly because my kbd is dvorak since sun 19:40...
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| Linux memory management tour guide. H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl |
| Scouting Vries cubscout leader. http://www.phys.uu.nl/~riel/ |
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