[ILUG] Out of Memory

[David Murphy]

Quoting <Pine.WNT.4.21.0003071052020.253-100000 at 8938cs820195.ied.cpqcorp.net>
by Paul Jakma <paul.jakma at compaq.com>:

> i'm saying if you want to go driving down country roads at breakneck
> speed, then you might as well have a light, well handling car. 

> your other option is to drive slowly (be careful about limits) and
> drive a nice fat volvo (add tonnes of swap). 

Ack, not car analogies again.
I'd say it's the difference between a Porsche engine in an old VW
Beetle, and a Porsche engine in a Porsche - if you squint, they kinda
look the same, they both go fast in a straight line, but if you try
and go around corners in one, you'll die a horrible fiery death, and
the manufacturers will say "Didn't he not know not to go around
corners?" to your relatives.
The other one just twithces a bit as you go around.

> I admit that linux has not played nice when it came to OOM. I never
> denied that. And it should hopefully behave a lot more like
> solaris/et al/ with the fixes in 2.2.15.

Yet this HUGE problem persisted over a major version (Kate mentioned
1.2.X->2.2.X) of the OS. That, to me, does not indicate that the Linux
kernel team are even *trying* to build an enterprise-ready kernel.

> But.. BUT... as i've been trying to say all along, if you have a
> problem with a box regularly going OOM then you have a setup
> problem. FIX that!

Regularly? I'm not talking about regularly. I'm talking about once in
a blue moon, and being ready for it. Extreme example - while on Sun's
Cluster course, the instructor mentioned an E10K he was familiar with,
which earned its owners STG£1,000,000 *profit* every eight minutes.

-- 
When asked if it is true that he uses his wheelchair as a weapon he will reply:
"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]
David Murphy - For PGP public key, send mail with Subject: send-pgp-key