Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: upstart
Handling of out of memory conditions very poor in my opinion.
Experiencing a bug where occasionally VLC player will have a memory leak
and quickly go from using 30MB of resident memory to several GB causing
RAM and small swap to fill up until there's no remaining memory (this
same situation has happened with other applications as well such as
kdenlive, but that's irrelevant)
I'd expect the Linux Kernel to gracefully handle this situation by
simply terminating the out of control process as soon as the memory
limit is reached so I can resume work in other applications without any
loss. What actually happens is nothing like this. As soon as the memory
limit is reached, the screen and mouse cursor lock up so I can't
manually kill the bad process. The system becomes completely unusable
for about 5 to 10 minutes totally frozen. After this excruciatingly long
time period, the kernel will start terminating applications.
Unfortunately it never terminates the VLC process which is hogging
several GB of RAM, but rather starts terminating processes completely
unrelated to the problem, such as GTK window decorator, openoffice,
firefox, etc. There's a delay of several minutes between each of these
terminations where the system remain unusable.
Eventually after a total of 10-15 minutes of this it will eventually
kill the process which is using all the RAM, it finishes leaving the
system in an unusable state needing reboot (no window title bars, compiz
dead, all accessories closed), and all unsaved work is lost in
applications that were terminated.
The out of memory handling is very inadequate for a modern operating
system.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: upstart 0.6.5-6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.38-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jul 29 18:03:18 2010
ExecutablePath: /sbin/init
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron: PATH=(custom, no user)
SourcePackage: upstart
** Affects: upstart (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: amd64 apport-bug lucid
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Poor handling of Out of Memory condition
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/611493
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