Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
Yes, the system does thrash, not a complete lockup. But, if you try to move the cursor and few times with no results it certainly seems like a lockup. I can usually get the system to switch to a VT where I can run top and kill the offending process, but it can take several minutes before it will do even that. It doesn't happen often, but with X running on three separate terminals (my wife, daughter and I each have our own setup running on this machine) and firefox running in each of them it does happen every now and then. My wife currently has 18 tabs open in firefox. My daughter only has one, but it has some kids game/education site up, all of which use flash. I usually have three or four tabs open, although I only have one at the moment.On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 07:10:04AM -0700, Marc Shapiro wrote:Is there any way, instead of restricting a resource, to have a command executed when a setpoint for a given resource is reached? Say, when FF uses 200M of virtual memory, or over 30% of CPU, a job runs which pops up a warning message. That way you know that a problem exists and can handle it BEFORE it gets to the point where the system is locking up.I wouldn't worry so much about %CPU since you can just run FF nice. Also, remember that the system should not lock up. The worst case should be heavy swapping (Thrashing) which means that the system will eventually respond. However, if the offending process is running niced, at least login and bash will have a higher priority.
I have never actually used nice, before. I guess I had better do some research.
-- Marc Shapiro mshapiro_42@yahoo.com