Every now and again a process or program goes hog wild and chews up all the resources on a Linux machine.
Its the usual thing, a memory leak or something. Shouldn't happen but it does. Unfortunately modern Linux distributions have an attitude that the user is all glorious and knows what he is doing and should be allowed all resources he possesses. Thus a memory leak can chew up all available ram, all available virtual ram and never let go. Then Linux's dread, and somewhat arbitary, OOM Killer (Out Of Memory killer) wakes up and starts clobbering random processes. Usually the wrong ones. A better administrated box sets ulimit's on resources so that processes that are go wild get clobbered. Here is a set of ulimits you can put in your own ~/.bash_profile to stop the rampage. Comments, suggestions, tweaks welcome. # This is the critical one. Tweak this to be a bit less than your physical RAM. #virtual memory (kbytes, -v) 500000 ulimit -v 500000 # This tends to drop 'core' files when ever _anything_ seg faults. # How ever, you can then fire up gdb and see why it died. #core file size (blocks, -c) ulimit -c 40000 #data seg size (kbytes, -d) 500000 ulimit -d 500000 # file size (blocks, -f) unlimited #ulimit -f #max locked memory (kbytes, -l) unlimited ulimit -l 100000 #max memory size (kbytes, -m) 400000 ulimit -m 400000 #open files (-n) 200 #ulimit -n 200 #pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 #ulimit - #stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192 #ulimit - #cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited #ulimit - #max user processes (-u) ulimit -u 160 John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] New Zealand Carter's Clarification of Murphy's Law. "Things only ever go right so that they may go more spectacularly wrong later."
From this principle, all of life and physics may be deduced.
