From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from austin.ibm.com (netmail1.austin.ibm.com [9.53.250.96]) by mg03.austin.ibm.com (AIX4.3/8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA16300 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:36:59 -0500 Received: from baldur.austin.ibm.com (baldur.austin.ibm.com [9.53.230.118]) by austin.ibm.com (AIX4.3/8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA30676 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:35:03 -0500 Received: from baldur (localhost.austin.ibm.com [127.0.0.1]) by baldur.austin.ibm.com (8.12.0.Beta7/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f3JIZ4Wm013145 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:35:04 -0500 Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:34:59 -0500 From: Dave McCracken Subject: Re: suspend processes at load (was Re: a simple OOM ...) Message-ID: <11530000.987705299@baldur> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: --On Wednesday, April 18, 2001 23:32:25 +0200 Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote: > Sorry, your comment isn't convincing enough ;) Why do you think > "arbitrarily" (decided exclusively by the kernel itself) suspending > processes (that can be done in user space anyway) would help? > > Even if you block new process creation and memory allocations (that's > also not nice since it can be done by resource limits) why you think > situation will ever get better i.e. processes release memory? > > How you want to avoid "deadlocks" when running processes have > dependencies on suspended processes? I think there's a semantic misunderstanding here. If I understand Rik's proposal right, he's not talking about completely suspending a process ala SIGSTOP. He's talking about removing it from the run queue for some small length of time (ie a few seconds, probably) during which all the other processes can make progress. This kind of suspension won't be noticeable to users/administrators or permanently block dependent processes. In fact, it should make the system appear more responsive than one in a thrashing state. Dave McCracken ====================================================================== Dave McCracken IBM Linux Base Kernel Team 1-512-838-3059 dmc@austin.ibm.com T/L 678-3059 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/