begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 01:50:05PM -0700: > Mike Marion wrote: > >Quoting Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > >>B) Linux is just a touch unstable when pushed hard > > We've heard this for years from people who can't point to any reason > (line of code) why.
Wow. I'll have to file that as a response to the next bug report I get. "Did not specify line of code causing application to crash and corrupt all data files. Bug denied." (Do I need to mark that as humor?) Instability problems are annoying, but waving your hands doesn't make it more stable. Or if it does, I've been doing it ALL wrong. > >We've found that it handles the cpu load just fine, it's when it's run > >into OOM situations too far and too fast that it falls over sometimes. > > You can't go too far into "OOM". When you are out of memory you are out. > What do you expect it to do when OOM? Complain. Slow down. Stay running long enough for me to identify and kill the offending process. > It must be something which does > not require the allocation of any more memory. Well, if all processes have equal access to all memory, sure. But it's a good idea to hold some memory in reserve for key processes. > There is no perfect > solution. That's a bad excuse for a poor solution. Now, I'd agree that there's no *optimal* solution for all desired behavior (stay up, stay running, keep the offending process around for forensic investigation, kill the offending process so let the system keep running...), but at a minimum, the system should degrade gracefully. Falling over isn't graceful. > The current policy is to kill off the process which most > recently tried to malloc as this is probably the one likely to be using > up most of the memory. Um.... no. Having a root shell up when something goes haywire, and then having that root shell killed when you run, say, ps... that's a pessimal solution. [snip] > >>If you do Solaris x86, suddenly these two things go away. > > I find that hard to believe. When swapping the disk is going to be the > bottleneck regardless of OS. Swapping algorithms have some effect, surely. But yah, you hit swap hard enough, and anything will get sluggish. -- Slow is not the same thing as instable. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
