Re: Ongoing 2.4 VM suckage

Miles Lane
2001-08-02T22:01:51Z

On 02 Aug 2001 14:52:11 -0700, Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:
> 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.

Hmm. What about the OOM process killer? Shouldn't that kick in?

Miles