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Re: uHm... what happened? :)



On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Winfried Truemper wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Dec 1996, Daniel Stringfield wrote:
> 
> > I would say that this COULD be a bug.  or an exploit.
> 
> If resources are not limited, a regular user can easily bring down a
> Linux Box.
> 
> The worst thing is virtual memory because Linux does not reserve a certain
> amount of RAM for important system tasks (nfsd, gpm, etc.). If these run
> out of memory you are lucky if you can immediatly do a clean shutdown.

I didn't get the first part of this conversation, but there is a definte
bug in the Linux (2.0.x, don't know about 2.1.x) MM/VM system.
Do lots of long linear reads and the machine will create chuge chunks of
unpagable memory, loose them and die of memory starvation (takes about
1-2h), even so the swap is barely used.

I have one program that can do this relatively reliably. 
A logfile analyzer that crashed our main www server a number of
times until I was finally there when it happened and was able
to identify the culprit. I took it out and the machine runs stable.

Mike

Michael Neuffer                i-Connect.Net, a Division of iConnect Corp.
mike@i-Connect.Net             Home of the Debian Master Server.
mike@debian.org                14355 SW Allen Blvd., Suite 140
503.641.8774                   Beaverton, OR 97005




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