Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 10:09:25 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za> Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, Dennis Glatting <dennis.glatting@software-munitions.com>, freebsd-stable@frebsd.org, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pgm to kill 4.3 via vm Message-ID: <200105071709.f47H9Pr61499@earth.backplane.com> References: <81562.989176063@axl.fw.uunet.co.za>
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:While that's a reasonable question when you're in a support role, I'd
:certainly like to hear whether "FreeBSD freezes on memory exhaustion" is
:something people "should just live with" or whether it's symptomatic of
:a bug that someone might one day want to fix but which folks should, for
:now, protect themselves against using resource limits.
:
:Ciao,
:Sheldon.
It's something I'd like to fix... but the proper solution is the
simplest one, not something complex. The simplest one is to start killing
bloated processes. We do this now, just not very well.
The reality is that modern day disks have so much disk space compared to
physical ram that the vast majority of sysads simply setup a
reasonably-sized swap partition, reasonable resource limits, and wash
their hands of the whole affair. A production machine with 128M of ram
and 1G of swap is going to go down the tubes performance-wise long
before it runs out of swap. Performance degredation under heavy
memory loads is a much more interesting and important problem
then swap exhaustion. Swap exhaustion is an interesting theoretical
problem, and we certainly want to do something (i.e. kill processes).
But that's it.
-Matt
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