Debian 'crashes'
Already several times happened to me the following:
When I use a few memory eating programs like Netscape and dselect
together, by whole computer freezes for a long time (10 minutes or so)
and I don't see another way out then simply turning it of, because
then I at least know what happens, and how long it is going to
take. The freeze is not always complete. Moving the mouse can
sometimes move the cursor on the screen minutes later. Probably it's
not fair to call it a crash, but I do consider it like this.
It seems that a way to accomplish this is running apt-get upgrade,
netsape and seti at the same time, in my computer (potato, PIII 500 64
Mb). In the beginning sometimes I can see that 'xload' gets a few
ticks, and the load is very high, like 20 or 30. I think the memory,
including swap memory (128 Mb), is exhausted in such a case. It just
happened again with acroread and netscape running.
So, I think this is very bad, since it should not be possible that one
or two programs hang the whole computer.
What can be done about this? Does there exist some 'memory quota'
mechanism? I would e.g. like to see that netscape processes never take
more than 50 Mb of memory. Or perhaps there exist some program which
starts shooting of non essential processes (like those of *(@$&(!
netscape) when the load gets higher than 15 or 20 or so?
Michiel
--
% Michiel Meeuwissen
% M.Meeuwissen@stud.warande.ruu.nl
% http://www.purl.org/NET/mihxil/
% Vidu ankaux: http://www.uea.org/katalogo
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