Re: running out of memory crashes linux?

[Agustin Navarro <anavarro vip eniac com>]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Mark Ivey wrote:

   >Hi,
   >I'm running RedHat 6.0 on a pentium 200 w/ 32 mb of ram and 60 mb of
   >swap space.  The other day I was writing a program for a school assignment
   >that basically makes a list of random numbers and then sorts them.  I told
   >it to run with a size of 5 million, and then I watched as it used up all
   >my swap space (I had xosview open) and my system stopped responding.  I
   >tried switching out of X to one of the consoles, it wouldn't respond.  I
   >tried telneting in to the machine, it wouldn't bring up the login prompt.
   >Do I have something set up wrong, or is it really this easy crash linux?
   >I wasn't logged in as root, and I had just compiled the program so it
   >shouldn't have been suid.  What am I missing?
   >
   >-Mark-
   >
   >
   >
   >

There are two things you can do to help minimize this problem:

First check if /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory has a 0 by:


  cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory


The seccond is to set higher values to freepages min/low/high

You can read all about it at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/proc.txt

HTH

Agustin

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Agustin Navarro P.
anavarro vip eniac com
58.2.9630746