I'm looking for some advice on tuning my linux box's memory management. I've got an older workstation that has merely 4GB of memory. If I try to run Firefox, and a few java apps (e.g., Eclipse), my machine thrashes about and effectively locks up because of out-of-memory issues.
For example: the mouse will continue to move, but won't change it's icon contextually. If I hit cntl-alt-f2 and try to log in to a virtual console, mgetty will eventually ask for the username, but after I hit enter, it just hangs, not popping up the password prompt, and after 60 seconds the login times out. Trying to ssh into the machine from somewhere else ends up timing out. After going on like this for literally 10 minutes, OOM-killer sometimes kills the right thing (one of the two processes hogging the most memory: firefox or eclipse), and the machine becomes usable again sometime later. I have heftier workstations I can use, but this behavior is really frustrating to me, because I'd like to think linux does good memory management. I've tried using huge swap (2x physical memory). I've tried with virtually no swap (on the theory that without swap, there would be no thrashing and at least oom-killer would have to do its thing without locking up the machine for 10 minutes first). The problem there was oom-killer making bad decisions about what to kill (e.g., the window manager, and then whatever out-of-control process is sucking up memory just sucks up whatever got freed, and nothing gets better). At least with some swap oom-killer seems to make better guesses about who to murder. Does anyone have any tips on how to prevent linux from thrashing like that? The behavior when low on memory seems atrociously bad. Thanks, Matt _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
