Re: Case where VM of 2.4.13pre2aa falls apart

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 10:47:21PM +0000, José Luis Domingo López wrote:
> On Friday, 19 October 2001, at 02:39:00 -0500,
> Leeuw van der, Tim wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've observed a case where the VM of 2.4.13pre2aa totally falls apart. I
> > know it's not the latest of Andrea's VM tweaks, but I didn't yet get a
> > chance to compile&reboot into a later version. I've noticed a similar
> > breakdown in one of the first pre-release kernels with the Andrea VM, btw.
> > [...description of problem apparently related to Mozilla ...]
> >
> Maybe what happens here doesn't have anything in common with what you
> experienced, but a couple of days ago I suffered a full X server crash due
> to a _big_ memory leak with Mozilla in one specific web page.
> 
> Linux kernel 2.4.12, Mozilla 0.9.5, and X 4.1.0. Open
> www.securityfocus.org with Mozilla. For a couple of minutes, it seems that
> all is going on nicely. Afterwards, and without any kind of user
> interaction with Mozilla, both mozilla and X processes start increasing
> their sizes, slowly, but steadily.

It certainly makes sense it's the userspace that has a leak and so the
system will start to swap and slowdown compared to the condition when
lots of free memory was available.

Andrea