2.6.22.3 out of memory crash

2.6.22.3 out of memory crash

[Dag Nygren]

Hi,

I have the kview zoom function mapped to the scrollwheel
with ctrl.
Now my wife found out and watching our photos wanted
to zoom out a bit. Then she just rotated the scrollwheel a lot
and expected the zoom to happen. What did happen was that
as the there was no apparent response she tried again, and again.

Finally the box probably was out of swap space (2GB RAM) and crashed
miserably.

This is not the expected behavior from a Linux box using a graphics
viewer and I now wonder if there is something I can do about it?
Kernel parameters?
Kview patch?
New wife ;-)

Best
Dag 

Re: 2.6.22.3 out of memory crash

[Nick Piggin]

On Thursday 20 September 2007 16:56, Dag Nygren wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have the kview zoom function mapped to the scrollwheel
> with ctrl.
> Now my wife found out and watching our photos wanted
> to zoom out a bit. Then she just rotated the scrollwheel a lot
> and expected the zoom to happen. What did happen was that
> as the there was no apparent response she tried again, and again.
>
> Finally the box probably was out of swap space (2GB RAM) and crashed
> miserably.
>
> This is not the expected behavior from a Linux box using a graphics
> viewer and I now wonder if there is something I can do about it?
> Kernel parameters?
> Kview patch?
> New wife ;-)
>
> Best
> Dag


If the app has used up all memory, then there is not a great deal
that the kernel can do about it.

The oom-killer ideally I suppose should terminate your kview process
and the machine should continue normally after a fashion. How did
it actually die? Any kernel messages?

Re: 2.6.22.3 out of memory crash

[Dag Nygren]

> On Thursday 20 September 2007 16:56, Dag Nygren wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have the kview zoom function mapped to the scrollwheel
> > with ctrl.
> > Now my wife found out and watching our photos wanted
> > to zoom out a bit. Then she just rotated the scrollwheel a lot
> > and expected the zoom to happen. What did happen was that
> > as the there was no apparent response she tried again, and again.
> >
> > Finally the box probably was out of swap space (2GB RAM) and crashed
> > miserably.
> >
> > This is not the expected behavior from a Linux box using a graphics
> > viewer and I now wonder if there is something I can do about it?
> > Kernel parameters?
> > Kview patch?
> > New wife ;-)
> >
> > Best
> > Dag
> 
> 
> If the app has used up all memory, then there is not a great deal
> that the kernel can do about it.
> 
> The oom-killer ideally I suppose should terminate your kview process
> and the machine should continue normally after a fashion. How did
> it actually die? Any kernel messages?

Thanks for responding to this.

No messages.

Behaved like it was randomly killing other processes?? It was actually still
swapping furiously when I reset the machine (at least the hard disk LED was 
blinking), this after some 10 minutes or so.

At that time the whole desktop had died, also some other processes.

I would also like it to kill the offending process, not others if it can
be avoided.

Is the behavior of the OOM killer configurable? I might have it wrong.

I now set the ulimit -v (max virtual memory) to 512MB in hope of this
protecting my system, but this might get me into trouble when using gimp etc.

Best
Dag