Killing activities when memory gets short

Marco Pesenti Gritti marco at marcopg.org
Sun Aug 8 15:10:36 EDT 2010



Sent from my iPad

On 8 Aug 2010, at 18:40, Tiago Marques <tiagomnm at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Just killing a random activity is a terrible idea becayse you don't want
> > your product behaving like it's defective; the pop up idea is way more
> > acceptable(and a lot better than having the system randomly behaving like
> > it's crashed). Either way, this is the extremely important use of swap
> > memory that doesn't exist here. I understand your engineering constraints on
> > the hardware but randomly killing activities is poised to confuse users and
> > cause people considering the hardware for deployment to think that you're
> > selling them something defective/baddly manufactured.
> 
> I tihnk I have been sloppy with my words, so let me clarify two things:
> 
> 
> I read through the thread but may also missed something.
>  
> - killing processes should be done only to avoid OOM (because
> currently the kernel kills the wrong thing most of the time).
> 
> True.
>  
> 
> - before the need for killing arises, we can do a myriad of things to
> prepare the user for what is coming and maybe to avoid it (some good
> ideas have already been posted in this thread).
> 
> The idea of killing activities with the content closed seems ok but it would probably be a good idea to have a way to opt out of it for some apps. I'm thinking a PDF that may be left open on purpose to serve as reference to something, a browser window, etc. Are you then proposing to use the LRU policy to do the killing? I'm thinking that a popup with a cancel tied to a timeout may be a good idea. Once it is not allowed to be killed, it should not try to again for the session, or at least for a very large increase in query time.
> Apps like instant messaging(though I don't recall one for Sugar), would definitely need a definitive opt out, no?
> 
> Best regards,
> Tiago
> 
>  
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Tomeu
> 
> > Best regards,
> > Tiago Marques
> >
> >>
> >> This, however, makes non-sugarized activities more dangerous to deal
> >> with. One more reason to demand proper sugarization.
> >>
> >> --
> >>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
> >>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
> >>
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> >
> >
> 
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