MemeCode - Blog

Loathing Linux

Date: 21/10/2003

Right now I've just had to power cycle my linux box twice! For the same stupid reason that Windows XP raised my ire: it can't multitask to save itself.

I don't care whether you can run 20 apps at once. I do care that when user land task "A" starts chewing up all available memory (inc. virtual) as fast as it can that I have at least a 1 minute window of opportunity to kill the sucka via the Task Manager or the command line, or SOMETHING!

Linux gave me about 5 key strokes on the xterm before it locked solid... which I used to type "top" and watch the first line of output half appear and then stop... Ctrl-Alt-1... nothin... even Ctrl-Alt-Del wouldn't shut the machine down. The scheduler was simply stuck paging massive amounts of memory onto disk.

So reboot... and use ulimit to limit the memory size of that process. Great idea! If ulimit worked as advertised! Good 'ol Linux reliability kicking in.

ulimit -Sd 100000

100mb should be safe enough I think...

"ps -A"

Ctrl-Alt-1?

Ctrl-Alt-Del?

OH COME ON!!!!

*kicks the power button*

From:

Email (optional):

(Will be HTML encoded to evade harvesting)

Message:

Remember username and/or email in a cookie. Notify me of new posts in this thread via email.	BBcode: [q]text[/q] [url=link]description[/url] [img]url_to_image[/img] [pre]some_code[/pre] [b]bold_text[/b]

Sitemap