Re: Firefox

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> PS 32GB RAM, and it still locks up to the point that a hardware button
> reboot is necessary. That's up there in the inexcusable abuse range.

You can mostly fix this problem by imposing a maximum to the amount of
RAM used by a process.

E.g. you can add a file `/etc/security/limits.d/10-mylimits.conf` which
contains something like:

    # Limit processes's memory use to a max of 4GB so that a single
    # runaway process can't bring the machine down.
    *       hard    rss     4096000
    *       hard    data    12000000

I guess with 32GB of RAM you can afford to use a higher limit than 4GB,
but the idea is to make sure that a single runaway process can't eat up
all the memory and make the whole machine unusable.

[ Firefox is still perfectly usable on my i386 machine, so 4GB per process
  *should* not affect normal use.  ]


        Stefan