Can a process be made immune to out-of-swap-space kills?

Andrew P. infofarmer at gmail.com
Sat Oct 29 16:00:39 PDT 2005


On 10/30/05, Doug Lee <dgl at dlee.org> wrote:
> Sometimes, I accidentally run something that eats up too much memory
> and causes the pager to run out of swap space and start shooting down
> processes to rectify the situation.  Sometimes, the process chosen for
> demolition happens to be `screen.'  Since this process sorta manages a
> whole lot of others and, on being zapped out of existence, leaves many
> of them running but inaccessible, I find this choice decidedly
> inconvenient.
>
> Is there a way for me to force FreeBSD to leave `screen' (or any other
> process) alone when selecting something to kill to free memory?
>
> Please Cc me any answers.
>
> Thanks much.
>
>
> --
> Doug Lee           dgl at dlee.org        http://www.dlee.org
> SSB + BART Group         doug at bartsite.com   http://www.bartsite.com
> "Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your
> path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on to say, `Why were
> things of this sort ever brought into the world?'"
> --Marcus Aurelius
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I don't know how to do that, but by all means you
shouldn't allow that to happen. It's not windoze,
where everything is meant to be swapped. Read
limits(1) manpage to know how to prevent a user
from messing with other processes in such an
unfriendly way.

Last time I ran into a problem alike was upgrading
from fedora core 3 to FC4. Yum requested about
4000GB (4 Terabytes) of RAM. The machine
became inaccessible (as in "showing no signs of
life whatsoever") for 5 hours, but in the end
something coredumped and I could login :-)


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