Messages in this thread | | | From | (Tim Hollebeek) | Subject | Re: Out of memory kernel deat | Date | Mon, 12 May 1997 14:24:14 -0400 (EDT) |
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Mike Jagdis writes ... > > On Mon, 12 May 1997, Thomas Koenig wrote: > > > I'd propose a fairly simple solution: send a SIGURG signal to > > whatever process has a signal handler for it installed. > > > > This process could then do whatever it wants to, such as allocating > > more swap, killing off an errant process or send an E-Mail to > > the admin to go out and buy more RAM. > > > > Policy is for userland. > > I seem to remember that AIX has a signal specifically for this > situation (SIGDANGER?). I seem to remember that this came up > last time the out of memory thread surfaced too. > > The bottom line is that there is no single algorithm, simple > or complex, that will consistently pick a non-stupid process > to kill for everyone. > > Might I suggest that SIGDANGER be introduced and used to warn > everything that they damn well better try and sort themselves > out? If things don't get better we can try killing things - perhaps > starting with things that don't have a SIGDANGER handler, followed > by things that didn't reduce their footprint in response to > SIGDANGER?
AIX is a wonderful OS to bring up in this debate, and has been mentioned several times before and IMO is an excellent example of what we should *not* do.
SIGDANGER is essentially useless because it is AIX specific; >99% of software ignores it so it gains you nothing. AIX then goes on to the kill the largest process solution, which as several people have pointed out from experience is a really bad solution. It is in fact on my list of Top 10 Things I Dislike Most About AIX.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Hollebeek | Disclaimer :=> Everything above is a true statement, Electron Psychologist | for sufficiently false values of true. Princeton University | email: tim@wfn-shop.princeton.edu ----------------------| http://wfn-shop.princeton.edu/~tim (NEW! IMPROVED!)
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