Re: malloc() patches round 3

[eric . rannaud . liste]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 01:22:38PM +0200, a memorable day, Jeroen Dekkers wrote 
for eternity :
> What about carefully choose a process and kill that? If for example
> mozilla starts eating memory, I don't want my system to reboot. I want
> my system to kill mozilla instead. The process should be chosen carefully,
> because you don't want an essiental task getting killed. The best way to
> do it is to choose the process which uses the most memory and isn't one
> of the essiental servers. Everything else keeps running then and the
> process which is killed can be restarted if necessary.
 
I think we could even avoid killing processes.

If a sort of DMZ is set for VM, as Igor suggested, we can decide to
stop (like C-z) the "non-essential processes" (which have to be defined).
Say that, when e.g. 95% of VM is full, these processes are
stopped, avoiding more memory consumption, then you have the
opportunity to control the system.
Many decisions can be taken here:
_ killing the responsible process (but that should be avoided as far
as possible, since data could be lost).
_ (temporarily) using a new swap partition/file, the user should be
warned but otherwise I think it could be quite transparent.
_ (...)

In all cases, procedures to free memory may be undertaken (as
evocated before in this thread).


Regards,
                E.R.

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