Messages in this thread |  | | From | Albert Cahalan <> | Subject | Out of memory for ... - suggestion | Date | Thu, 25 Jul 1996 18:47:55 -0400 (EDT) |
| |
From: Marek Michalkiewicz <marekm@i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl>
> as we know, running out of swap space causes the kernel to start > killing random processes, and every time this happens, a message > "Out of memory for <program name>" is logged. The problem is, > this doesn't tell me much which program actually used up all the > swap space (possibly because of a bug). > > Here is my suggestion: in addition to the "Out of memory for ..." > message, there should be a process listing similar to "ps m" (or, > if that would overflow the syslog buffer - syslogd could be very > slow to read it due to heavy swapping - at least a few processes > which are using the largest amount of memory). This way, it > would be easier to track down the program (or luser :-) causing > the trouble. > > (Of course it would still be nice if we can handle "out of VM" > situations more gracefully than we do it now, but this has been > discussed many times already...)
One important thing it that root processes should get priority. They could be ranked in order of importance:
everything root something root - uid, euid, whatever nothing root
Within a rank, kill the biggest thing for now. (That would be Netscape.) After per-user memory tracking is in place, go for a process run by some piggy user.
I don't think this means enough to me, although xv with a 24-bit 1500x2000 image once killed my X server and left the console useless. Any ISPs out there should be _real_ concerned - unless it is OK for users to bring down the web server, sendmail, and other useless programs.
|  |