From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Sep 22 11:44:24 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from pop3-3.enteract.com (pop3-3.enteract.com [207.229.143.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id C3C961527A for ; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 11:44:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Received: (qmail 44196 invoked from network); 22 Sep 1999 18:44:15 -0000 Received: from shell-3.enteract.com (dscheidt@207.229.143.42) by pop3-3.enteract.com with SMTP; 22 Sep 1999 18:44:15 -0000 Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:44:15 -0500 (CDT) From: David Scheidt To: Nate Williams Cc: Alfred Perlstein , Chuck Robey , "Daniel C. Sobral" , Ivan , Matthew Dillon , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Out of swap handling and X lockups in 3.2R In-Reply-To: <199909221727.LAA14290@mt.sri.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Nate Williams wrote: > Maybe, and then again, maybe not. A program is requesting memory, so > putting other processes to sleep *keeps* them from freeing up memory. The process that is trying to use memory is put to sleep. In the machine runs out of swap cases I have seen (which isn't many, because I build boxes with lots of swap) there has been one rogue process (or group of related processes) that was using up swap. When the process hits this, your problem is going to go away. It might make sense to wait to wake processes until resource usage has dropped below some threshold, so that an operator has a chance to intervene and correct the problem. Clearly, this won't solve all problems. I think it could be made quite useful, thoguh. David Scheidt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message