Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 14:04:18 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> Cc: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net>, "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, Ivan <Ivan.Djelic@prism.uvsq.fr>, Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Out of swap handling and X lockups in 3.2R Message-ID: <37E93642.9BC40EBF@softweyr.com> References: <199909221727.LAA14290@mt.sri.com> <Pine.NEB.3.96.990922131457.26337A-100000@shell-3.enteract.com> <199909221848.MAA14800@mt.sri.com>
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Nate Williams wrote:
>
> > > Maybe, and then again, maybe not. A program is requesting memory, so
> > > putting other processes to sleep *keeps* them from freeing up memory.
> >
> > The process that is trying to use memory is put to sleep.
>
> Then this 'rogue' process is never allowed to free up any of it's
> resources, hence the system is *still* out of swap, and all of the
> non-offending processes must deal with the out-of-memory situation they
> haven't caused, nor can they do anything about it.
>
> So, now we have a system that just takes longer to completely die off
> due to lack of resources since we've stopped the biggest offender from
> getting bigger.
>
> (Also, it turns out that often enough the process that requests the page
> that drives the system over the edge is not in fact the rogue process,
> thus causing the system to slowly become unusable with no way of
> recovering.)
>
> I'd much rather my system die quickly than slowly, since by dying
> quickly I can get back to work much quicker instead of not getting any
> work done for a long period of time.
Perhaps keeping track of the most recently memory-hungry process and killing
is, so we get the one that is currently asking for the most pages, or making
the most allocation requests? (The two are not necessarily the same).
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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