Hi, In 2010 I noticed that viewing many GIFs in a row using gpicview renders my Linux unresponsive. There is very little I can do in such a situation. Rarely after some minutes the OOM killer kicks in and saves the day. Nevertheless, usually I end up using Alt+SysRq+B.
This is the second computer I can observe this problem on. First was Asus EeePC 1000 with Atom N270 and now I have Lenovo S210 with Celeron 1037U. What happens is gpicview exhausting whole available memory in such a pattern that userspace becomes unresponsive. I cannot switch to another terminal either. I have written a tool that allocates memory in a very similar way using GDK -- https://github.com/wodny/crasher. I have also uploaded some logs to the repository -- top, iostat (showing a lot of reads during an episode), dmesg. I suppose the OS starts to oscillate between freeing memory, cleaning caches and buffers, and loading some new data (see iostat logs). Currently I am using Debian Jessie with the following kernel: 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u6 (2015-11-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux I can observe the most impressive effects on my physical machine (logs/ph-*). On a VM (logs/vm-*) usually the OOM killer kills the process after a short time (5-120 seconds). Possible factors differentiating cases of recovering in seconds from recoveries after minutes (or never): - another memory-consuming process running (e.g. Firefox), - physical machine or a VM (see dmesg logs), - chipset and associated kernel functions (see dmesg logs). Things that seem irrelevant (after testing): - running the application in Xorg or a TTY, - LUKS encryption of the root filesystem, - vm.oom_kill_allocating_task setting. What can I do to diagnose the problem further? -- Marcin Szewczyk http://wodny.org mailto:marcin.szewc...@wodny.borg <- remove b / usuĊ b xmpp:wo...@ubuntu.pl xmpp:wo...@jabster.pl -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/