[Bug 27441] Re: Thrashing hell

[Ole Laursen]

Problem remains.
 
It's a general Linux problem. Here's another annoyed guy who dubs it "the Achilles heel" of Linux, comparing it to (of all things) Windows 98:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/swap-thrashing-
can-nothing-be-done-612945/

If you can fix this, I think it's worthy of a Slashdot story. The OOM
killer did call for a lot of news stories back in the days. It's not
easy to fix, but I think with complete control over the OS as is the
case with Ubuntu, it's possible.

Also I guess it's a security problem on servers. You don't need root
access to a machine, you just need shell access and a memory eating
process, and you're ready to take down the machine. :)

So just to reiterate: a faulty process can allocate enough memory to
push Linux into thrashing, constant paging out to the disk. This
behaviour can continue for more than 30 minutes without any progress.
Meanwhile the machine is unusable, doesn't respond to input of any kind.
So the objective is to put in default safety guards to prevent this from
ever happening by denying the faulty process more memory or terminating
it, e.g. after having detected that the past say x seconds were spent
thrashing.

-- 
Prevent extended periods of thrashing
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/27441
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