On Tue, 2013-01-15 at 07:36 +1100, paul.szabo@sydney.edu.au wrote: > Dear Dave, > > >> Seems that any i386 PAE machine will go OOM just by running a few > >> processes. To reproduce: > >> sh -c 'n=0; while [ $n -lt 19999 ]; do sleep 600 & ((n=n+1)); done' > >> ... > > I think what you're seeing here is that, as the amount of total memory > > increases, the amount of lowmem available _decreases_ due to inflation > > of mem_map[] (and a few other more minor things). The number of sleeps > > you can do is bound by the number of processes, as you noticed from > > ulimit. Creating processes that don't use much memory eats a relatively > > large amount of low memory. > > This is a sad (and counterintuitive) fact: more RAM actually *CREATES* > > RAM bottlenecks on 32-bit systems. > > I understand that more RAM leaves less lowmem. What is unacceptable is > that PAE crashes or freezes with OOM: it should gracefully handle the > issue. [...] Sorry, let me know where to send your refund. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Quantity is no substitute for quality, but it's the only one we've got.
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