RELENG_4 on flash disk and swap

[Dmitry Pryanishnikov]

Hello!

On Sat, 11 Mar 2006, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>> But AFAIK the kernel kills NOT the requesting process but the one with the
>> largest RSS. This selection algorithm seems to be the dumbest one, since
>> process with largest RSS almost always is the process which does some real
>> work.
>
> This frees up the greatest amount of memory and so minimises the risk
> of the problem recurring.

  For OS yes, it's great to obtain a lot of free pages. But as I wrote in 
another post, if this process was e.g. bgpd, router becomes unusable
and unreachable. So at this point OS benefit differs from system administrator 
benefit: for me, it would be better if that remote router paniced and rebooted
instead of being up but non-operational.

>> Compare "never satisfy request" and "kill another, totally unrelated,
>> process".
>
> This has been argued about many times in the past - though not with
> any satisfactory solution AFAIK.  Look for 'SIGDANGER' in the archives.

  OK, I see, it's very difficult task to decide which process to kill.
So I as an administrator want to have a tool to turn this process killing
off. Of course I can (and will) patch OS kernel, but I'm sure that I'm not
alone. That's why I've proposed some ideas in this area.

Sincerely, Dmitry
-- 
Atlantis ISP, System Administrator
e-mail:  dmitry at atlantis.dp.ua
nic-hdl: LYNX-RIPE