Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:47:39 +0000 (GMT) | | From | Riley Williams <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Patch to Memory Subsystem ... (Needed?) |
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Hi again Brian.
>>> Just a thought, but how much memory does root need to do suchlike >>> cleanups? Let's see - load the login shell (probably already in >>> memory anyway, so 0k), run ps (may already be in memory) to find >>> out which processes are currently hogging memory, then kill >>> (usually a shell internal, so 0k) to get rid of a few of >>> them...that should do...
>> You are not counting the individual data segments of every bash >> etc...
> It seems I need to explain the trouble I experienced (this is how > one of my colleagues explained it to me ... )
> Picture this. We're running some Cobol (*sigh*) applications which, > based on the sale of my employer, calculates totals, income, > handling stock and so on. These applications are handling some > rather large databases (1.4Gig and up). The cobol runtime / > applications does as much of their work in ram as possible. So as > long as it get the ram, it uses it. And Linux is giving away the > ram as fast as possible ;o)
> The cobol-runtime has this bad habit of 'hanging' when it can't get > more free ram (memory exhausted). It's not Liunx'es fault. It's the > runtime vendor - they admit it. "But wait until version 4.2, it will > be out in 1999 ..." We can't live with that.
> Oh! The cobol-applications are usually run during night when nobody > uses the servers - so no 'bash', 'ps' or the like are in the cache. > The next morning when somebody tries to login (s)he will be denied > access ....
> And to make matters even worse. It's not *everyday* we experience this > - it's dependable on how well my employer is selling ... (lot of sale > means lot of data to be handled ...)
I can understand the problem there, but surely a better solution would be to have a limit such that no one process may use more than (say) 90% of non-kernel system memory, thus ensuring that there's always some memory free, and have that limit tweakable...
Also, just a thought, but would more swap space help?
Best wishes from Riley.
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