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Date:      Wed, 31 Jul 1996 16:24:07 +0400
From:      Juri Tsibrovski <jt@sw.ru>
To:        dg@Root.COM
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Considering FreeBSD 
Message-ID:  <2.2.32.19960731122407.00b12a5c@myth.sw.ru>

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At 00:06 29.07.96 -0700, David Greenman wrote:
>>On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Paul J. Mech wrote:
>>
>>> 0) When Linux runs out of virtual memory, it crashes.  What is FreeBSD's
>>> behavior under these conditions?
>>
>>FreeBSD will start killing processes until the memory problem is resolved.
>>This usually means the program that is trying to start, and working
>>backward.  Occaisionally the VM system gets too busy and kills init, but
>>that is very rare.
>
>   FreeBSD will never kill init or any process whose process id is less than
>48. In the extremely unlikely event that the process consuming all the memory
>has a pid less than 48, the system will hang. This is extremely unlikely
>because when the pids wrap at 32767, then wrap back to 100, so usually only
>processes that were started at system startup time will have pids < 100.
>

Is 48 a kind of magic number? Last night  one of our machines eventually run
out of VM, then inetd (pid 91) and tac_plus (authorization and
authentification daemon for our terminal servers, pid 190) got killed. Now
I'm seriously considering modifying the source code to protect more
processes from being killed.
So, what's the Pros et Contra, besides the risc of system crash when one of
that processes going crazy? Any other solution?
---
jt -- just typist :)




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