Re: Resource limits

[Coywolf Qi Hunt <coywolf@gmail.com>]

On 9/26/05, Roger Heflin <rheflin@atipa.com> wrote:
>
> While talking about limits, one of my customers report that if
> they set "ulimit -d" to be say 8GB, and then a program goes and
> attempts to allocate 16GB (in one shot), that the process will
> hang on the 16GB allocate as the machine does not have enough
> memory+swap to handle this, the process is at this time unkillable,
> the customers method to kill the process is to send the process
> a kill signal, and then create enough swap to be able to meet
> the request, after the request is filled the process terminates.
>
> It would seem that the best thing to do would be to abort on
> allocates that will by themselves exceed the limit.
>
> This was a custom version of a earlier version of the 2.6 kernel,
> I would bet that this has not changed in quite a while.
>
>                         Roger

It's simple. Set /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory to 2 (iirc) to get
arround this `bug' .
--
Coywolf Qi Hunt
http://sosdg.org/~coywolf/