[ILUG] kernel upgrade and swap

[Paul Jakma]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, John P. Looney wrote:

>  Just had my first experience with it yesterday. Wine went nuts, and
> grabbed all ram. The machine started getting slow...then Linux killed
> xchat, xmms and gnome-terminal on me, to free up memory for Wine. Nice
> one!

or you could have set reasonable per-process limits, on RH ->
/etc/security/limits.conf, eg:

@users          hard    core    100000
@users          soft    rss     99000
*               hard    rss     110000
@users          soft    nproc   100
@users          hard    nproc   200
@users          soft    nofile  1000
@users          hard    nofile  3000
@users          soft    data    80000
@users          hard    data    110000
#@users         soft    stack   16384
#@users         hard    stack   32768

and make sure that your xdm/kdm/gdm pam config files include
pam_limits.so under session. On RH7 most services reference a common
pam config file, system-auth.. make sure it has:

session     required      /lib/security/pam_limits.so

and hey presto, as long as your limits are sane you will probably
never hit the linux OOM killer.

> Kate

To answer Paul Collins:

> I wish he'd fix the OOM killer and get the balancing right first.

balancing isn't the problem.

> I'm getting seriously tired of watching him and the MM "team"
> futz this.

futz what, implementation of code that is guaranteed to never please
everyone all the time?

> His main response to people complaining/reporting bugs (he seems
> to equate the two) is "show me the code", even when it's obvious
> bugs in code *he* wrote.

<rant>

well to be fair, how the fsck are you ever going to write a perfect
process killer? think about it... it's impossible unless you have (to
borrow a phrase from mr. lyda) esp.c.

what annoys me the most is how people whine about this on
linux-kernel, when there exists a mechanism in linux to help avoid
hitting OOM (and the attendent kernel mm/oom_kill.c) -> per process
limits - and they don't bother setting it up.

So netscape locked up your box, or the kernel killed xmms, xchat,
etc.. instead of the rampant wine.. well if you had a reasonable
limit set then wine would have hit it and died before your box became
unreasonably slow and your other processes would be fine.

now, per-process limits aren't perfect - they won't stop a user or
process deliberately trying to hit OOM - but they do make a huge
difference in everday usage - use them.

</rant>

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org
PGP5 key: http://www.clubi.ie/jakma/publickey.txt
-------------------------------------------
Fortune:
I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats; If it be man's work I will do it.