Re: Ongoing 2.4 VM suckage

Jeffrey W. Baker
2001-08-02T21:52:28Z

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Jakob Østergaard wrote:

> You fill up mem and you fill up swap, and you complain the box is
> acting funny ??

The kernel should save whatever memory it needs to do its work. It isn't
my problem, from userland, to worry that I take the last page in the
machine. If the kernel needs pages to operate efficiently, it had better
reserve them and not just hand them out until it locks up.

> This is a clear case of "Doctor it hurts when I ..." - Don't do it !
>
> I'm interested in hearing how you would accomplish graceful
> performance degradation in a situation where you have used up any
> possible resource on the machine. Transparent process back-tracking ?
> What ?

Gosh, here's an idea: if there is no memory left and someone malloc()s
some more, have malloc() fail? Kill the process that required the memory?
I can't believe the attitude I am hearing. Userland processes should be
able to go around doing whaever the fuck they want and the box should stay
alive. Currently, if a userland process runs amok, the kernel goes into
self-fucking mode for the rest of the week.

-jwb