I've myself seen some lethal memory hoggers in 2.2.x, and a friend also
reported one to me. The symptom is simple: the system starts swapping like
mad, and with the current hard disk speeds and not-too-large swap partitions,
the swap space is full after a few seconds - while it's swapping that hard,
you don't have a chance to recover, anyway. After the attack, not only the
memory hogging app is killed, but a lot of other apps (often the X server
itself) are kicked out, too. The X server is especially nasty, since it leaves
the video card in an "unknown" state (for the OS), and with VC switch
blocked.
IMHO the behaviour to react on out of memory condition should be to kill
the application that allocated most pages recently, and not randomly shoot at
well-behaving apps. And second, the system should send a signal first,
before the situation becomes so awful that the kernel has to take immediate
actions. This would allow the X server to quit gracefully (the X server can be a
memory hog, too: just try to create a pixmap several thousands pixel width
and height).
-- Bernd Paysan "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/Sent through Global Message Exchange - http://www.gmx.net
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