Re: [PATCH] VM fix for 2.4.0-test9 & OOM handler

[Andi Kleen]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 01:52:21PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> One thing we _can_ (and probably should do) is to do a per-user memory
> pressure thing - we have easy access to the "struct user_struct" (every
> process has a direct pointer to it), and it should not be too bad to
> maintain a per-user "VM pressure" counter.
> 
> Then, instead of trying to use heuristics like "does this process have
> children" etc, you'd have things like "is this user a nasty user", which
> is a much more valid thing to do and can be used to find people who fork
> tons of processes that are mid-sized but use a lot of memory due to just
> being many..

Would not help much when "they" eat your memory by loading big bitmaps
into the X server which runs as root (it seems there are many programs
which are very good at this particular DOS ;) 

Also I think most oom situations are accidents anyways, not malicious users.
When you're the only user of the machine sophisticated per user accouting
won't be very useful. 

-Andi
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