low-memory testing

[Kim Quirk]

This weekend I found that opening too many activities too quickly (I opened
about 5 activities before waiting for them to each open); caused my machine
to hang miserably. After about 20 minutes of absolutely no response, I held
down the power button. There was no virtual terminal or dev teminal, the
display was showing half of something it was trying to open, but nothing I
could do would get a response.

This might be CPU usage as oppose to memory corruption or leaks ... when I
rebooted it did come up ok.

Bug 4483.

Kim

On 10/28/07, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/28/07, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> > Albert, can you please see that there are proper trac entries fro any
> > leaking applications?
>
> I made one, #4471, for the activity I am aware of.
>
> I'm concerned about worse things, like data corruption.
> Leaks and mere crashes are nothing in comparison.
> Running out of memory makes allocations fail. When
> that happens...
>
> Does JFFS2 corrupt itself? Reiserfs and ext3 have both
> suffered from this problem.
>
> Does the journal corrupt itself? I think it does, though I
> certainly don't have decent proof yet.
>
> Does a driver, in kernel or X, start a DMA to the wrong
> location in memory? (address 0, a previous allocation
> that has since been freed, or a clean page that was never
> locked down and just got discarded by memory pressure)
>
> BTW, there is also a need for power-loss testing. Do we
> get corruption if we interrupt etoys/squeak or the journal
> at a bad moment? Power loss will certainly happen.
> This could use an automated test rig.
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