From: jimmyhua@aludra.usc.edu (Jimmy Huang) Subject: Re: Thought: compressed libc ? Date: 6 Mar 1993 01:49:50 -0800
torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) writes:
>>2) Freeze the offending process. (This is really nasty unless you
>>know what's happening and can kill something quickly.)
>>
>>3) Kill something. (AIX 3 does this, but it does warn processes with
>>SIGDANGER first. Something like a background FTP mirrorer or even a
>>redundant server might choose to exit, freeing memory.)
>Linux does something that is a mix between 2 and 3. I does kill a
>process (essentially randomly), but in practice linux will try to run
>with too little memory for too long, and you'll get a machine that is
>mostly unusable - it's probably much faster to reboot and fsck than to
>wait for linux to give up and kill something. Add RAM or swapspace if
>this happens to you.
I have a simple suggestion, Instead of 3, why can't we kill the
offending process? In fact, i kinda rather have that happen
first then the freeze. But, that's just a matter of taste.
> Linus