On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 09:50:39PM +0200, Christopher Zimmermann wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Sometimes I experience system hangs because of memory leaks. A process
> with a memory leak eats all memory till the system starts swapping.
> Only a few seconds after the process was started the system slows down
> till it is practically useless. I believe this could be prevented by
> deactivating swap so that the OOM killer would catch this process.
> But is there a better way to solve such issues?
Perhaps. And perhaps not.
You could play with "ulimit -v" - see your shell docs for info about
ulimit (it's a built-in). This can put limits on the per-process
resource usage.
I had good luck with adding e.g.:
ulimit -v 512000
in my ~/.xsession .
Be careful not to set it too low though or weirdy stuff will happen.
Sometimes processes allocate loads of memory and never use it(!): This
doesn't take up swap and is quite harmless. But it is still subject to
ulimit size. I had things like my browser Java plug-in failing silently
until I increased the ulimit accordingly...
Hope this helps
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl@jorgensen.org.uk http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl@jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
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