No surprise on memory

[Tomeu Vizoso]

2008/12/16 Benjamin Berg <benjamin at sipsolutions.net>:
> On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 23:21 -0500, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
>> I'm no expert, but making the system work well without overcommit would
>> probably require extensive modifications to the python interpreter, the
>> fd.o libraries (dbus, gstreamer, telepathy, etc.), gecko, and maybe even
>> X.  All of these would need to allocate only as much memory as they need,
>> and react appropriately when malloc returns NULL.  In other words, 'tain't
>> gonna happen.
>
> GLib will abort when g_malloc fails. This means that most libraries that
> use glib (GTK+) will not handle out of memory at all.
>
> It may be interesting to adjust the OOM score of some applications. This
> way it should be possible to protect the core applications (sugar-shell,
> journal, X, ...) from being killed in an OOM situation.

I'm with Benjamin here, if the OOM killer kicked in soon enough and
activities were clearly marked as first candidates to be killed,
stability would be much much better.

And if background activities were killed before the active one, we
would avoid data loss.

Regards,

Tomeu