Re: grep freezes system
On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 11:10:36PM +0100, Michael Naumann wrote:
> 29.12.2002 20:06:56, Robert.Land@t-online.de (Robert Land) wrote:
> >Yet this grep thing happened today - I know 64MB RAM is
> >not quite what you would use nowadays - but I only have
> >currently a few xterms running and no fancy stuff which
> >would eat up my mem (swap is nearly untouched).
>
> I'm fairly sure, that the memory consumption of grep is quite independent
> of the number of files/dirs to be searched. Except for transferirng
> memory Buffers from "free" to "cached", which can again be
> viewed as free.
What makes you think this? On the first view and with my
rather sparse knowledge I would assume this too. Grep only
needs to extract the searched word, put it to the desired
output, forget and look for the next files. Why should grep
buffer anything?
> Complete lockup? That's pretty strange. I'd like to know
> how to reproduce this. For our companies products, we have
> to be (or make) sure, that nothing alike is ever going to happen.
Only and only if I change to su and do a stupid
"grep -r something /*" which I would bet I didn't yesterday
when searching for env variables in /etc. Doing this as a
normal user grep would give a few files out and then a mem
exausted err which is quite contrary to my assumption above
grep shouldn't do any buffering.
For overworked admins using my mashine with potato installed
on this would force a hard reset because the keyboard is not
being responded by the system. Didn't try a telnet though
as this box not acting as a netserver yet.
Robert
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