On 12/23/05, Eben King <eben1@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 22 Dec 2005, Paul M Foster wrote:
>
> > Ken Elliott wrote:
> > >>> My confuser crashes several times a day, always has, most any image
> > >
> > > viewer will do in within 2 or 3 minutes. (it's because I am running
> dozens
> > > of applications,
> > >
> > > I suspect you have defective RAM, or another issue. My Win2K box has
> not
> > > crashed once all year long. Ditto with my Linux boxes. My XP box
> did, but
> > > that is clearly due to the wireless drivers.
> > >
> > > I'd look into it. This should not happen, no matter how many apps you
> run.
> >
> > While I agree, it sounds like there's a hardware issue, it *is* possible
> > to crash a Linux machine due to load. From what I understand, a Linux
> > kernel that runs out of memory (and swap) melts down in a most
> > unpleasant way. This may have improved over time, but I believe there
> > are still issues.
>
> I heard it starts killing processes randomly (presumably weighted by RAM
> use?) to free up memory. I've never run into that myself, so I can't
> speak
> from personal experience.
>
> Something like that. It's actually the domain of the oom killer to decide
which process to kill. It looks at process number, nice level, whether it's
interactive or not, and then picks one to kill. The point is that it will
kill ten Mozilla windows before it goes after your database server, or
something along those lines.
However, one time I tried to install FC1 on a _really_ old laptop, the
computer ran out of memory, and oom_kill killed anaconda. Oops.
Tyler
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