[Gllug] kill -9 does not work

[Nix]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Jake Jellinek gibbered:
> Most likely some form of fast memory leak or memory over commit and the
> machine entered into "swap hell".

You can also, if you're unlucky, get the system into a state where any
filesystem access (to given filesystems) will freeze solid, because some
task took out the superblock lock and never bothered to give it back
again (perhaps it oopsed or deadlocked).

That could cause a hanging ls(1), too... and unlike swap hell, the ls
would hang forever.

> We do end up running a lot of monitoring scripts which automatically kill
> processes that start to eat memory etc, as although Linux copes admirably
> with resource over commitment,

What? Until recently, Linux was *appalling* at dealing with OOM
problems; it still has a poor VM, especially in 2.4. (Thankfully, this
is being fixed; and VMs *are* a complete bastard to get right...)

-- 
`This will immediately become a flamewar.' --- Mark Mitchell

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug