Re: Out of memory kernel death
Keith Rohrer (kwrohrer@uiuc.edu)
Thu, 8 May 1997 01:07:08 -0500 (CDT)
> On 7 May, Theodore Y. Ts'o muttered something vague about:
> > From: Rik van Riel <Rik.vanRiel@phil.ruu.nl>
> > elegant solution for this. If FreeBSD is out of memory, it
> > looks through the processes and kills off the largest one.
> > This should be doable in Linux too...
> >
> > The problem is that the largest process is often the X server. Often
> > this will indeed free a lot of memory, but it's not necessarily the best
> > thing to do...
> If I remember right, AIX does exactly that (kill X). It's really not
> as good of a solution as it seems, as killing X often prevents you from
> correcting whatever's hogging the memory.
> Now, killing netscape might be a good idea ;-)
Why not kill the biggest non-root process (and pray it's not the window
manager :-() or the biggest process owned by the user wanting more memory?
Or reserve some memory for root to log in and kill things?
Keith