🚀 go-pugleaf

: >>This does not crash the machine.  Everything will come to a 
: >>grinding halt, yes, but once you kill the offending process
: >>it works just fine.  It by no means requires a reboot.
: >I have seen Linux boxes come to such a grinding halt due to swap space that it 
: >was impossible to:
: >1. Switch consoles while at the machine itself; 
: >2. Log in remotely to kill processes.
: Yea, so?
: I've done this to my machine at home a couple of times.  Go home, get your 
: Mac or IBM, and run 80 processes on it at the same time.  Bet you can't.
: Linux and most (if not all) Unix machines can.  NT probably can as well.
: >The two times I saw this happen (in the last six months) were cases of a 
: >single user locking the machine; these might have been avoided since that one 
: >person obviously knows everything that's going on on the machine at any given 
: >time; what happens when there are many users on the machine (and users A, B 
: >and C start demanding jobs at about the same time)?
: Take precautions other ways.  Limit processes to a max heap size.  This will 
: stop this from happening.  No big deal.
: >What if a programmer tries to index all machines running web servers on the 
: >local network but has the program start independent processes for each 
: >connection attempt, and unwittingly exhausts all swap space in a few minutes, 
: >parlyzing the machine (my friend did this by accident)?  Every user on the 
: >system suffers.
: Yea, but on unix machines you can do this.  Can you on a Mac or Windows3.11 (o
: or even a W95 machine)?
: >How do you get control of the machine to kill these processes when the machine 
: >has come to a grinding halt?  You reboot, and that is what these people did.

These are not cases of the operating system spontaneously hanging the
way Windows does, these are cases of users beating the hell out of the
operating system with Big Stick. This is easily avoided, as previously
noted, start using quotas.

--

 ______________________________________________________________
|Linux the FREE OS that has a Performance/Price ratio that is  |
|INFINITELY higher than anything sold by Micro$oft!            |
|                                                              |
|         http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/linux.html                |
|______________________________________________________________|
NOTE:-This is my Opinion and not necessarily the opinion of
ANYONE else, especially not my employer!

Colin Smith.
colins@mojo.europe.dg.com