Re: [SLE] adobe acrobat alternative

From: Randall R Schulz (rschulz_at_sonic.net)
Date: 02/26/05

  • Next message: Jerry Feldman: "Re: [SLE] System clock running 3x real time" 
    To: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 08:33:17 -0800

    Danny,

    On Saturday 26 February 2005 08:33, Danny Sauer wrote:
    > On Friday 25 February 2005 04:16 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote:
    > [...]
    >
    > > (*) The one weakness I've experienced more than any other on my
    > > SuSE Linux system is its vulnerability to a rogue process consuming
    > > so much memory that everything else gets swapped out and it becomes
    > > impossible to even kill the errant process.
    >
    > Clearly, you need more memory. :) Most modern system will accept
    > 2GB, if not 4 or more. You should have time to kill acroread before
    > it fills up 2GB of physical memory.

    I have 1 GB. Brute force cannot be the right way to address this
    problem. Besides, a run-away program can easily consume all the RAM and
    start driving swap activity much more quickly than a human user could
    recognize the problem and attempt to stop it. In fact, by the time
    there is any indication of a problem, it's pretty much too late
    already. Furthermore, such processes often are not responding to the
    messages triggered by clicking the close box or typing ALT-F4, forcing
    one to run ps or activate the KDE System Guard process table attached
    to CTRL-ESC. And finally, the X11 process that mediates keyboard and
    mouse activity is affected, too, making any corrective action
    whatsoever impossible.

    The upshot is that this is a genuine vulnerability that cannot be solved
    by throwing memory at the system.

    > --Danny, noting that the kernel starts killing processes when it runs
    > out of memory...

    That might be helpful if I had no swap space, in which case the swap (or
    paging) activity that makes the system unusable would never occur.

    The simple empirical fact is that a process that exhibits extreme and
    unbounded memory consumptive behavior has one several occasions left me
    with no alternative but to press the mainboard's reset switch.

    Randall Schulz 

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  • Next message: Jerry Feldman: "Re: [SLE] System clock running 3x real time"

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