kernel killing processes when out of swap

[Marc Olzheim]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 06:46:45PM +0200, Dag-Erling Smrgrav wrote:
> There is no "large process detection".  The first process that tries
> to fault in a new page after the system runs out of swap gets killed.

Which sucks when a process like X tries to free and realloc things when
possible and tries to be system friendly, but thus increases the chance
to get shot down, while programs over-allocing memory and never freeing
it get to survive. It's a sad world. :-P

Anyway, when at our office we were running X on low-memory systems and
had to reboot often because of X being killed, rendering the text
console useless, we had a patch to prevent processes with specific names
being killed. I could revive this and turn this into a sysctl if
anyone's interested...

Marc
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