[ILUG] Out of Memory

[David Murphy]

Quoting <15AD5D7936F8D21198240000F831776E0378B6EA-100000 at dboexc1.dbo.cpqcorp.net>
by Paul Jakma <paul.jakma at compaq.com>:

> this is not nice. linux does this, so does solaris i gather, so all
> this shows is that solaris has a better process killing methodology.
> (but if you're killing then you're already OOM).

Killing isn't nice, but sometimes it's necessary. Killing processes is
better than having the box die.  

> or perhaps a bug in the admin? why don't you have resource limits
> set up?

By this logic, the fact that Win 3.1 program can crash the whole
machine doesn't make it a bad OS - it's just a bug in the programmer.
It's a fact of life that we expect OSes to survive bugs in programs
run under them.

> > Yeh, everythings slower than Linux, that's why Linux rules
> > </slashdot>.

> ah please don't throw "linux rules" at me. I'm not a fanaticist.

> linux is actually very fast. 'tis faster than Tru64 V4 on Alpha,

Is that a single-processor Alpha, by any chance? How about a 4-way
one? An 8-way one? a 16-way one? (etc.).

> and considerably faster than solaris 7 x86. You must know this.

IMHO. Solaris for Merced/Itanium is the first non-SPARC version Sun
are even pretending to take seriously.

> I'm not saying it's inherently better, i'm just saying that it gets
> it speed by being light, and therefore you have to set it up
> properly.

I believe that may well be the practical reality, but Linux is being
sold as enterprise-ready - the caveat you cite would be appropriate
for a research OS.

-- 
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"That's a malicious rumour. I'll run over anyone who repeats it."
Stephen Hawking - [http://www.smh.com.au/news/0001/07/features/features1.html]
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