Re: need a daemon that kills off memory hogs
On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 06:37:18PM -0400, Avdi B. Grimm wrote:
> This is driving me nuts... every now and then, for one reason or
> another, some program(s) will gobble up all available memory (128MB RAM,
> 256MB Swap) and effectively freeze the computer. It's not a single,
> isolateable program, it's usually caused by something different each
> time. Sometimes it caused by starting a huge memory hog like NetBeans
> while there are several X sessions running. This last time it was
> because I accidentally told Konqueror to open up a few dozen large JPEGs
> at once, and it cheerfully started a few dozen instances of the image
> viewer program. My mistake, to be sure, but an easy one to make.
>
> Now, I'm told the kernel (I'm running 2.4.8) has an out-of-memory
> handler which kills off memory hogs when the system runs out of memory.
> However, either it's not enabled, or it's idea of "out-of-memory" is a
> little different from mine. This last instance, the computer was
> utterly frozen. It did not respond to any input, not even Ctrl-Alt-Del.
> After a few minutes it wasn't even thrashing anymore, just hung. But no
> processes were automaticaly killed off. I wound up having to hard-reset.
Tried 2.4.12? 2.4.10+ kernels are supposed to have a better handling for
this kind of situation.
>
> Back in my Mandrake days, I recall their being a daemon that was set up
> as part of a standard install, which as far as I could tell, did the
> following: sat in the background, and periodically requested various
> services from running daemons (like httpd). If the daemons took too
> long to respnd, indicating the computer was overloaded, it would start
> killing off misbehaving processes. Unfortunately, I can't recall the
> name of that daemon.
>
> So, my question is, is there some package available for Debian that will
> do the same job as that unknown Mandrake daemon? I'm getting sick and
> tired of having to hard-reset this thing every time it runs out of
> memory... reminds me too much of Win95.
Reminds me of early 2.2 kernels, they usually panicced in such kind of
situation :(
--
,-------------------------------------------.
> Name: Alson van der Meulen <
> Personal: alson@flutnet.org <
> School: alson@gymnasiumleiden.nl <
`-------------------------------------------'
Well, I've got a backup, but the only copy of the restore program was on THAT disk....
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