Re: Shouldn't debian be configured better by default ?
Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net> writes:
> On 7/11/99 Sami Dalouche wrote:
>
> >While I was cleaning my home directory, I saw this program that I compiled.
> >After that, I launched it and... My X became frozen and then crashed
> >( I executed the program in an Xterm). I think it's because it used
> >all the memory available...
> >I don't want to try but what could happen if I'd have run it from a console
> >? Whould the system crash ?
>
> I find it surprising that this program caused this much damage...
>
> I once tried to crash my Redhat GNU/Linux system with 96MB of real
> ram and 64MB swap partition, so I had netscape 4.6 go to a keyserver
> and search for `michael' (which this server will return a couple
> thousand results in one complicated html page that ends up being
> about 15MB in size) well after a long time watching netscape bloat up
> eventually all memory was consumed all swap all real, any attempt to
> run the smallest of utilities resulted in seg faults...
>
> $ ps
> Segmentation fault
> :)
>
> all i had to do was (slowly) hit the close box on netscape and it
> went away and all was well and i kept on adding to a 50+ day uptime
> iirc.
Did you check all of your daemon programs to make sure they were still
running? When something like that has happened to me, I almost always
find that various daemons have quit because they couldn't get memory
when they needed it, so I have decided that it is easier to just
reboot. In my case though, it is ImageMagick that has always caused
problems. It is the only large program that I know of that doesn't
check to see if enough memory is available before grabbing it. After
I discovered that, I checked xv, gimp, and the netpbm tools, and all
of them would abort with an error message if not enough memory was
available.
--
Carl Johnson carlj@peak.org
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