>Thats very true. FreeBSD is a little smarter, and actualy kills a runaway
>process if it allocates more memory than is available. It of course tries
It's less about its ability to kill processes (Linux does it too), but sane
default timeouts. I dunno about FreeBSD, but it can take Linux over an hour
to report an out of memory condition in any definitive form - the box
slowing to a crawl doesn't count as definitive ;) It's kinda like, why do I
have to wait 2 minutes for telnet to kill itself if I telnet to a bad
address in windows?
>to
>page things in and out of swap first, hoping the high memory condition will
>soon resolve its self. FreeBSD is also one of the only OSes I've seen that
>kick processes (idle ones, i.e., cron, getty, etc) out of memory for kernel
>buffers and disk cache to improve preformance for busier ones.
Well that's kinda dangerous in and of itself. I haven't run into *too many*
OOM conditions (I do try and stack my boxes! er...) but I've noticed linux
tends to kill kswapd first :/
Rob Nelson
rdnelson@co.centre.pa.us