Re: OOM?

[Debian Linux User]

This perfectly normal behaviour present for a long time (if I right that
you experience just a normal Out-Of-Mem situation).

The kernel will sometime run out of memory. Then some programm looks for some
more memory and wont get any and thus segfaults (it will actually get memory
when malloc'ing, but using it segfaults).

The problem now is that it can be any task that allocates one too much page
and as it looks (esspecially on Alpha) it allways something critical and
hardly ever the task causing the memory runoff.

With a little bad luck your init dies or your X or sshd.

But what does it help to kill some small task, when the faulty one is still
running? Shortly afterwards the next random task gets killed, until eigther
the system is unusable or by pure luck the faulty task is killed.

MfG
	Goswin

PS: I saw a patch somewhere that says it kills tasks more intelligently.