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SubjectRe: Overcommitable memory??
Date
On 21 Mar 2000 13:40:28 +0100, you wrote:

>Den 20-Mar-00 18:44:28 skrev Horst von Brand følgende om "Re: Overcommitable memory?? ":
>> Jesse Pollard <pollard@cats-chateau.net> said:
>
>> [...]
>
>>> YOU ARN'T OOM - a specific user is out of resources, not a catastrophic
>>> failure.
>
>> If the user's programs get killed, they'll be pissed off.
>
> And for a good reason too. So don't kill the user's programs. That's why
>Jesse and others would really like per user memory quotas, just as you have
>per user disk space quotas. If you can disable overcommit, the program is
>in control of what happens when it can't get the amount of memory it would
>like. If you also add per user memory quotas, the system administrator can
>prevent a single user (or another finite number of users) from using all
>memory.

The process CAN be told there isn't enough memory to do what it wants.
Just signal it (with a signal it can catch.) It can then use that
signal to trigger garbage collection (if it's an ML or Java VM, for
example), shrink the cache (an music player), reduce spare processes
(Apache), whatever.

IMO, it's much better to get a signal which means "we're getting short
of memory, folks", which can be handled in ONE place, rather than
returning 0 as a pointer - which many apps then try to dereference,
ending up segfaulting themselves anyway.


James.

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