Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 7/11/99 Sami Dalouche wrote: > > >While I was cleaning my home directory, I saw this program that I compiled. > >After that, I launched it and... My X became frozen and then crashed > >( I executed the program in an Xterm). I think it's because it used > >all the memory available... > >I don't want to try but what could happen if I'd have run it from a console > >? Whould the system crash ? > > I find it surprising that this program caused this much damage... > > I once tried to crash my Redhat GNU/Linux system with 96MB of real > ram and 64MB swap partition, so I had netscape 4.6 go to a keyserver > and search for `michael' (which this server will return a couple > thousand results in one complicated html page that ends up being > about 15MB in size) well after a long time watching netscape bloat up > eventually all memory was consumed all swap all real, any attempt to > run the smallest of utilities resulted in seg faults... > > $ ps > Segmentation fault > :) > > all i had to do was (slowly) hit the close box on netscape and it > went away and all was well and i kept on adding to a 50+ day uptime > iirc.
Did you check all of your daemon programs to make sure they were still running? When something like that has happened to me, I almost always find that various daemons have quit because they couldn't get memory when they needed it, so I have decided that it is easier to just reboot. In my case though, it is ImageMagick that has always caused problems. It is the only large program that I know of that doesn't check to see if enough memory is available before grabbing it. After I discovered that, I checked xv, gimp, and the netpbm tools, and all of them would abort with an error message if not enough memory was available. -- Carl Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
