NightwishFan
January 12th, 2011, 02:47 PM
I just had a run in with an out of control process on my laptop; Which is fairly low end (for today) with only 2ghz 2x cpu and 3gb of ram. I was doing a kernel compile, and queuing about 18 jobs on Handbrake, on nice 19 and 15 respectively. At the time I also was web browsing and tabbing on and off between a movie I was watching on VLC. I am using the stock Ubuntu kernel only with a swappiness of 100.
I noticed right away there was a problem as my sound cut out, and my disk began to churn, which usually means something is hitting swap. The mouse gets a little choppy. I was unable to interact with the gui much to debug the problem, but I was able to get myself to a console. However by the time I got to the console which did not take long, my swap filled up, and the blessed OOM killer swooped in and had slain the out of control process, which happened to be VLC oddly enough. My desktop was back to responsiveness within 30 seconds.
I normally am wary of desktop performance with Linux however this was quite up to my standards. I was not forced to reboot to get back to working order, and both my handbrake and kernel compile continued as if they were not interrupted. (Though I might debug the results of both to see if any kind of corruption occurred).
Regardless, the point of this thread is really a "glorious exposition comrade" and I wondered if anyone else ever had to deal with a run away process and how their system stood up to it. I suppose the worst case would be a process that pages just enough that it will not be killed, and everything stays slow until you manage to get to a console to wipe it out. It also seems to point that the virtual memory subsystem is something to be looked at in desktop performance, not just cpu/preemption.
I noticed right away there was a problem as my sound cut out, and my disk began to churn, which usually means something is hitting swap. The mouse gets a little choppy. I was unable to interact with the gui much to debug the problem, but I was able to get myself to a console. However by the time I got to the console which did not take long, my swap filled up, and the blessed OOM killer swooped in and had slain the out of control process, which happened to be VLC oddly enough. My desktop was back to responsiveness within 30 seconds.
I normally am wary of desktop performance with Linux however this was quite up to my standards. I was not forced to reboot to get back to working order, and both my handbrake and kernel compile continued as if they were not interrupted. (Though I might debug the results of both to see if any kind of corruption occurred).
Regardless, the point of this thread is really a "glorious exposition comrade" and I wondered if anyone else ever had to deal with a run away process and how their system stood up to it. I suppose the worst case would be a process that pages just enough that it will not be killed, and everything stays slow until you manage to get to a console to wipe it out. It also seems to point that the virtual memory subsystem is something to be looked at in desktop performance, not just cpu/preemption.