From owner-freebsd-stable  Mon May 28 16: 7: 5 2001
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Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 16:06:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Message-Id: <200105282306.f4SN6xG13452@earth.backplane.com>
To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org>
Cc: Tom <tom@uniserve.com>, <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: machine hangs when no memory/swap left ...
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:On Mon, 28 May 2001, Tom wrote:
:>
:> On Mon, 28 May 2001, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
:>
:> > stupid question, but shouldn't there be a mechanism to prevent that?
:> > something to crash the process or somethign when the machine runs out of
:> > virtual memory?
:>
:>   It has always been my experience that it does.  Basically the process
:> that requests memory that doesn't exist, is killed.
:
:Any way of turning this feature on? :)  I have a hung, remote machine
:right now that is out of memory ... we caught it "just about to do it"
:earlier today, and it actually did it this evening :(
:
:This aft, it was two 400Meg httpsd processes that brought her close, so
:I'm guessing similar this evening did her in ...

    This is a known bug in -stable and -current.  The kernel is supposed to
    kill the bigger processes but locks up before it gets the chance.
    It's probably fairly easy to fix, but I haven't had time to delve into it.

    In regards to runaway processes... that's why you set reasonable
    resource limits.  So a runaway process dies without taking the system down
    with it.

						-Matt

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