Re: Hang after running out of memory

On Apr 20, "Craig Reyenga" wrote:

> I have been following the thread here on current_at_ about problems 
> occuring when running out of memory, so I wrote a C++ program that 
> simply mallocs about 144M of memory. My system has 256MB+491MB(swap). 
> I can run the system out of memory just fine by running multiple 
> copies of the program, and the kernel does kill one if I run too many,

> however shortly after, when I go to killall the programs the system 
> hangs, (although pings, etc manage to survive for a few mintues 
> longer) and I have no choice but to press the reset button. While it 
> is hung, I _can_ press ^T and it shows the load, which increases by 1 
> about every 45 seconds:

I have seen twice what I believe may be a similar problem: when logged
in via ssh (puTTY), the terminal stops responding to commands. Unlike
with an interrupted ssh connection, in which no characters are echoed,
in this puTTY echoed ^C and ^Z literally to the screen. At that point,
FreeBSD stops accepting SSH connections, though the machine continues to
respond to pings. In each case, the server showed high loads due to GBDE
and low memory, for so far unknown reasons (perhaps GBDE), just before
the error occurred. Both time this happened, the server would again
accept connections after about 30 min. There were no disk errors in the
logs.

--Lucky