Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 29 Sep 2000 09:06:23 -0400 (EDT) | From | Byron Stanoszek <> | Subject | 2.4.0-test9-pre2 OOM problem |
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I've been using 2.4.0-test9-pre2 happily for about 2 weeks without any crashes or other memory problems (I'm using X 3.3.6, so the shared memory stuff didn't break anything).
I accidentally compiled a program that I have using electric fence. The program does a huge number of mallocs. Well, within 1 minute of running the program, it eventually ate up 150MB of ram -- 128mb physical ram and 32mb swap. Bad thing was, this program wasn't killed by the kernel, and it proceeded to eat up all available memory.
For a few minutes, the HD light blinked on a few times as it was probably sorting out which pages to store in swap and which to keep in memory. But after 2 minutes or so, the HD activity ceased and no other program appeared to run. Using Alt+ScrollLock (I have sysrq disabled), I was able to determine that the kernel was still flipping through the processes and it was still active and hasn't crashed yet. Only, there was no memory available for processes to do anything, and judging from Ctrl+ScrollLock, most were in the state waiting to be swapped in.
I'm afraid to try any kernel above pre2 right now because of the OOPSen reported by many people. I just wanted to bring attention to this problem in case it hasn't already been fixed.
Regards, Byron
-- Byron Stanoszek Ph: (330) 644-3059 Systems Programmer Fax: (330) 644-8110 Commercial Timesharing Inc. Email: bstanoszek@comtime.com
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