From owner-freebsd-arch  Wed May 16  5:54:59 2001
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Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 07:57:19 CDT
From: dave <dleimbac@earthlink.net>
To: questions@freebsd.org, arch@freebsd.org
Subject: python fork call raised my load over 400!
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If you have a block of free time today check this out!

I keyed this in interactively with Python <it wasn't a file>
----SNIP--------

import os

while 1:
	os.fork()
-----SNIP-------

This user run program brought my system to a load of 419 with the system
using
94% of the resources and 500 user processes on my AMD Duron 800 box with
256MB RAM... 

I don't know that the processor/RAM is relevant but I could not fork
anymore!

I started manually killing the processes with ctrl-c and ctrl-d until I
could
log in as root and killall -9 python.

It was not good. 

The system did NOT crash and all my resources came back after all the
python
processes were killed.

I have a friend who tested the same 3 lines of python code right now on his
linux box.  He ended up rebooting but he may not have tried to manually
kill the processes to get back.

My ultimate question is ... should I be comparing FreeBSD to Linux? 
Does it really matter if Linux is performing better or worse than FreeBSD?

Still  a user process probably shouldn't be able to hose the whole system
IMHO.

Dave




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