[Bug 27441] Thrashing hell

[Ole Laursen]

Public bug reported:

Two days ago I clicked a torrent link in Epiphany which for some reason made one
of the desktop applications eat a lot of memory. So the machine suddenly froze
and started trashing. I waited about 10 minutes, then gave up, pressed the power
button and left. When I got back the next morning the machine had left swap
hell, noticed the power button press and turned itself off.

This made me think that perhaps it would be a good idea to somehow do something
to prevent having the kernel  spend more than 10 minutes with the desktop in a
totally frozen state. IMHO freezing everything for more than a few seconds does
not make any sense on a desktop machine. It might be enough to set the ulimit
settings to something sensible, e.g. so that no application can eat more than
90% of the RAM or more RAM than there will still be say 100 MB available for the
desktop on the machine.

I'm experiencing this on a fully upgraded Breezy Badger, the kernel seems to be
2.6.12-10-686.

I previously reported this as bug #27392 for the kernel, but the maintainer
rejected the notion that the kernel could do anything about it and suggested I
filed a new bug. And yes, I realise that in some cases a default process limit
will be wrong. I'm not arguing that everyone should have these settings forced
down their throats, I'm arguing that the defaults are wrong. It is a lot easier
to remove a protection if you need it than it is to protect the system yourself,
and most people probably don't run real memory hogs like scientific simulations.

** Affects: linux-source-2.6.12 (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Medium
     Assignee: Martin Bergner
         Status: Needs Info

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Thrashing hell
https://launchpad.net/bugs/27441