Re: [2.4.18] Security: Process-Killer if machine get's out of memory

Andreas Hartmann (andihartmann@freenet.de)
Sun, 24 Mar 2002 23:23:56 +0100


Thunder from the hill wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> Maybe, it would be possible to sort all known processes by there
>> memory usage and combine it with the speed of their memoryrequests.
>> If memory gets low, and there is a process, which suddenly requests a
>> lot of memory, this process get's killed, even if there is another
>> process, which has three times more memory allocated then the "fast
>> growing" process. If all processes are growing nearly equal and memory
>> gets low, the process with the most memory usage get's killed -
>> because with this process, the kernel achieves the target (to get free
>> memspace) best.
>
> So what if I want to malloc() say 100 MiBs at once? I'll get into
> trouble then, because if I don't malloc() with sleep()s I get killed.
> That's perfect performance then.

Only if there's not enough free memory. You can't get more memory then
the machine has.
The mechanism gets active only when there isn't enough free memory for
your request.

Regards,
Andreas Hartmann

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