On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 9:51 AM, VictorMiller <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yesterday I started up sage 4.6.2 on one of our compute servers,
> started the notebook interface, and connected to from firefox on my
> workstation.  I started up a notebook session, where I constructed a
> particular elliptic curve over GF(2^351), and a point on it.  I
> (unwisely) tried
>
> P1.order()
>
> When it didn't come back after 30 seconds or so, I realized that I was
> implicitly asking Sage to compute the order of the curve and then
> factor that order, so I tried to kill it by using Interrupt, which
> didn't work, so I restarted the worksheet.  However, at that point
> things became non-responsive.  I eventually ended up logging onto the
> server and stopping sage.  About an hour later the computer
> administrator came into my office saying that I had nearly brought the
> compute server to its knees because I had started 1300 processes (all
> running something in the sage directory)!  Has anybody seen anything
> like this before?

I have definitely never heard of or seen anything like this before.
Is it something you can reproduce? -- You don't say above...

This of course sounds like a "fork bomb". Note that many computer
systems are configured by default to not allow a single user to create
that many processes, in order to avoid fork bombs.   You can use
ulimit to set a process limit on a per-session basis, if you want to
test this issue again on your computer without the possibility of
actually nearly bringing the computer to its knees.

 -- William

>
> Victor
>
> --
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-- 
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

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