What to do when out of memory

[Aaron Lehmann]

Hi,

I want to bring up a topic that I have never heard dicussed but have had
major problems with myself.

The basic problem is that if I run a program that eats up all the memory
on the system than the kernel will start swapping crazilly and make the
system completely unresponsive. It may take a minute or two to get its
attention, or it may be completely locked up. From what I have seen, this
is not acceptable behavior nor is it what I would expect from any
UNIX-like operating system.

I know that your first impulse will be to tell me to set PAM's limits.conf
or a limits option within my shell. I think this is irrelevant. Regardless
of userspace settings, the kernel should handle OOM situations more
gracefully than swapping to death. This may be a gross oversimplification
of the problem (as I have no kernel hacking experience or knowledge), but
can't the kernel just deny memory allocations if all the memory on the
system is in use? Maybe there should be a few K of ram that can never be
allocated into just so the kernel can recover from a situation like this.

Thanks for listening to the rant of a complete idiot when it comes to
kernels,
Aaron Lehmann


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