On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 10:24:50 -0800, Anton wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> the problem is simple. I don't have an excessive amount of memory, but
> it is enough to run an X11 system and several applications
> comfortably.
>
> However, I tend to open too many browser windows or sometimes there is
> a lot of data to process in a program, and then everything hangs and
> the hard-drive rattles with the usual noise giving me the impression
> of an infinite swap loop.
>
> Is there any way the kernel or a tool can prevent this?
> I want these memory hogs stopped or killed if necessary, but please
> let the other
> system run.
>
> Anton

Install more memory.

A few questions for you: How much memory do you currently have, what
window manager are you using, and how large is your swap partition?

-Matthew

Anton wrote:

> Is there any way the kernel or a tool can prevent this?

Most shells allow you to use `limit` to limit (for example) how much
memory a process may allocate.

Jacob
--
Warning: Dates in calendars are closer than they appear.

gazelle-81@lycos.de (Anton) wrote in message news:<38a5446f.0402221024.1465f89@posting.google.com>...
> Hey all,
>
> the problem is simple. I don't have an excessive amount of memory, but
> it is enough to run an X11 system and several applications
> comfortably.
>
> However, I tend to open too many browser windows or sometimes there is
> a lot of data to process in a program, and then everything hangs and
> the hard-drive rattles with the usual noise giving me the impression
> of an infinite swap loop.
>
> Is there any way the kernel or a tool can prevent this?
> I want these memory hogs stopped or killed if necessary, but please
> let the other
> system run.
>
> Anton

Install more memory or just take it easy. You know your memory is
little so why do you do all that? The computer can't do everything for
ya.

And what kinda low mem are we talking about exactly?

I have 64MB RAM, the rest is broken. There is a 100MB swap partition.
I'm running icewm to reduce the load.
I don't really want to upgrade this laptop because it's old anyway,
but I need it to work for my studies.
It just worries me that a process out of bound hangs the system. The
approach with limiting the resources is what I'm after and I'll have
to look that up somewhere.
I thought there must be an algorithm, maybe kernel patch, to reduce
this eternal swapping.
And weirdly enough browsers just go crazy once you've opened too many
pages simultaneously, even if you close them later.

Anton

Anton wrote:
: I have 64MB RAM, the rest is broken. There is a 100MB swap partition.
: I'm running icewm to reduce the load.
: I don't really want to upgrade this laptop because it's old anyway,
: but I need it to work for my studies.
[...snip]...
: to look that up somewhere.
: I thought there must be an algorithm, maybe kernel patch, to reduce
: this eternal swapping.

I don't know about this, but (having some similarly limited machines), I
do have some suggestions:

1. hdparm -- Make sure you are getting the most out of your
drive. Swapping is bad enough without doing it in 16-bit w/o dma
when you have 32 bit ide and dma availible... Figure out your
best mode, and set it in a init script. I know from experience
that this will help.

2. Consider trying a 2.6 series kernel. I expect that the low
kernel latency will return some responsivness even while you
are swapping. Haven't gotten around to trying this yet. While
you're building it you can, of course, strip out anything you
don't need to reduce the kernels memory footprint.

3. Low memory alternative apps. Try rxvt instead of xterm, etc.
An extreme examples of this would be qemacs instead of GNU emacs,
but I haven't gone that far yet. I'm a big fan of dillo for web
browsing (but you will need to keep a full featured browser on
the disk...). If your video subsystem used main RAM, go with
fewer colors.

Good luck,

--
-- David McKee
-- dmckee@jlab.org

rxvt is just as good a xterm for me and dillo is pretty cool.
especially for just looking at local html files.
does anyone have suggestions for nice low-mem...
filebrowser or email programs?

i am still convinced that there could be a way to optimise swapping on
low mem systems. maybe kernel 2.6 is better at that...

cheers for the suggestions,
anton

> 3. Low memory alternative apps. Try rxvt instead of xterm, etc.
> An extreme examples of this would be qemacs instead of GNU emacs,
> but I haven't gone that far yet. I'm a big fan of dillo for web
> browsing (but you will need to keep a full featured browser on
> the disk...). If your video subsystem used main RAM, go with
> fewer colors.

In comp.os.linux.misc Anton wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> the problem is simple. I don't have an excessive amount of memory, but
> it is enough to run an X11 system and several applications
> comfortably.

I've had similiar problems..

> However, I tend to open too many browser windows or sometimes there is
> a lot of data to process in a program, and then everything hangs and
> the hard-drive rattles with the usual noise giving me the impression
> of an infinite swap loop.

For browsers, a big mistake people use is memory cache. (even if you have a
lot of memory) You'll want to set that to zero, not 1M, not 5k, not even 1b
:-)
"memory cache" for copy where it was in the first place!
Web page -> swap-out -----> swap-in -> disk-out

Or worse, Linux will swap-out another application so the browser can store
the page in "ram", which isn't really desirable.

Setting cache to zero is almost always preferable anytime you have virtual
memory, even if you had tons of memory to spare. (Linux would implement
memory cache via disk buffer anyway) I wish browsers wouldn't even have a
memory cache at all, it's silly in any modern v-ram setup with disk cache.

> Is there any way the kernel or a tool can prevent this?
> I want these memory hogs stopped or killed if necessary, but please
> let the other
> system run.

You can have a look at ulimit for other problems.

Jamie

I ahve atoshiba 480cdt 266 64ram and 2guig HD
I am runnign debian with icewmrox filer dillo and firebird browsers
as wel las a few misc apps
seems to do me fine



On 25 Feb 2004 17:44:18 -0800, gazelle-81@lycos.de (Anton) wrote:

>rxvt is just as good a xterm for me and dillo is pretty cool.
>especially for just looking at local html files.
>does anyone have suggestions for nice low-mem...
>filebrowser or email programs?
>
>i am still convinced that there could be a way to optimise swapping on
>low mem systems. maybe kernel 2.6 is better at that...
>
>cheers for the suggestions,
>anton
>
>> 3. Low memory alternative apps. Try rxvt instead of xterm, etc.
>> An extreme examples of this would be qemacs instead of GNU emacs,
>> but I haven't gone that far yet. I'm a big fan of dillo for web
>> browsing (but you will need to keep a full featured browser on
>> the disk...). If your video subsystem used main RAM, go with
>> fewer colors.