Am Don, dem 22.November 2001, um 05:27:32 -0800, schrieb Erik Steffl: > > usually it kills more programs, system services (cron) etc... I have > few question related to this problem: > > - is it possible it's kernel problem? I haven't heard anything too > weird about 2.4.10
well, 2.4.10 is quite bad at deciding which process to kill. you should use 2.4.14 or even better 2.4.15pre9 (which seems to become 2.4.15). > - how can I find (post mortem) which program caused the problem? i don't think there is a way (except, of course, heavy logging). > - how does kernel decide which programs to kill? is there any way to > influence it? I would rather have netscape (usually a memory hog) killed > than system services (like samba daemons, cron, nfs daemons etc.) the kernel uses some heuristics (which have been sane only since 2.4.14). unfortunately you don't have a way to tweak the behaviour. usually the kernel chooses the process which uses the most memory (and won't free any in a low memeory situation). i suppose it would be best to upgrade the kernel and then try to reproduce the problem. chances aren't that bad that it is way better. > > related incident: I have quite a few mp3 files and I noticed that when > I sort playlist in xmms by song name it eats all available memory (and > does the same after I restart it, I didn't even find any relevant > setting in config file but when I remove it problem goes away). I have't > tried it before so I don't know whether it's new problem or old one (I > haven't find anything similar on xmms or debian page so I filed a bug > report) can't help you with that though. bye, Sebastian
