That sounds much easier than it is. Once your "near", the machine is
swapping as if its life depends on it (which happens to be the case :-).
So you decide to shoot my xfig. It wants to save my work. How long do
you think it needs? How long do you think we've got? Oh, normally my
file would save in a fraction of a second, but under these
circumstances (extremely low on memory) it can easily take tens of
seconds. If your aim was correct (i.e. you shot the one bogus program)
the program will not react and continue to eat resources. You're going
to have to force the situation soon.
If your aim was not correct, we have a rogue program still eating
resources like mad, together with a just wokenup xfig trying its best
to save my work.
What I can immagine to work, is to change the system to "single-user"
mode quicly. You select one program, and politely kill it. You also
switch to this single-user mode. Now every memory allocation will
block until we're out of the single-user mode. Only our selected
program is allowed to continue. That reduces swapping. That makes sure
that the other processes don't grab resources we need for this program
to finish writing my work.
Roger.
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* ------ Microsoft SELLS you Windows, Linux GIVES you the whole house ------
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