> I've myself seen some lethal memory hoggers in 2.2.x, and a friend also
> reported one to me. The symptom is simple: the system starts swapping like
> mad, and with the current hard disk speeds and not-too-large swap partitions,
> the swap space is full after a few seconds - while it's swapping that hard,
> you don't have a chance to recover, anyway. After the attack, not only the
> memory hogging app is killed, but a lot of other apps (often the X server
> itself) are kicked out, too. The X server is especially nasty, since it leaves
> the video card in an "unknown" state (for the OS), and with VC switch
> blocked.
> IMHO the behaviour to react on out of memory condition should be to kill
> the application that allocated most pages recently, and not randomly shoot at
> well-behaving apps. And second, the system should send a signal first,
> before the situation becomes so awful that the kernel has to take immediate
> actions. This would allow the X server to quit gracefully (the X server can be a
> memory hog, too: just try to create a pixmap several thousands pixel width
> and height).
Greeaatt idea. Can you cook up patch or something ? Andrea (andrea@suse.de)
Rik (riel@nl.linux.org) and others tried really hard to make things better but
so far no really acceptable (for Linus :-) solution was found AFAIK...
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