CPU hog causes KDE System Guard to open too late.

[Anton Rolls]

Ignazio Palmisano wrote:
> Andrew Jarrett wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Anton Rolls <anton at wilddsl.net.au> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
> []
> 
>>>  Is there a way to raise the priority of the user
>>>  interface or of KDE System Guard so that launching
>>>  it is not held up by any cpu-hogging app ?
>>>
>>>  Regards,
>>>
>>>  Anton.
>> I am not sure about a way to give the KDE System Guard higher
>> priority, but have you tried Ctrl+Alt+Esc?  This should change your
>> cursor to an 'X' and you can click on Thunderbird to instantly kill it
>> (BTW, you can hit Esc again to get your normal cursor back if you
>> change your mind).  This might bypass the long wait for the System
>> Guard and you will get to kill the app (which I assume is the point of
>> opening the System Guard).  The problem might be that Thunderbird is
>> hogging access to your drive and not letting the System Guard
>> interrupt.  Whatever the problem is, you should definitely think about
>> opening a bug report with Mozilla.
>>
>> Andrew
>>
> 
> A trick I discovered recently is the -s option for kill:
> kill -s KILL process
> will send a KILL instead of the default signal, and that helped me get 
> rid of some processes which weren't responding at all to any attempt I 
> made at shutting them down.
> HTh,
> I.
> 

Hi, yes, I'm aware of the different signal types.
The problem is getting to a point where I can
kill the errant process. The fact is, the process
is allowed to make my machine unresponsive, so
even opening a shell to analyse which process it
is and kill it becomes untimely.

I would like to set up the system permanently so that
it is ready at all times for any process that decides
to become a cpu-hog, such that the system can still
serve me in the usual manner.

Also, it would be good to limit any process with
customized resource usage limits.

I am assuming someone has already done this kind of
thing, so I must do some more research...

In the meantime, I got "monit" set up for another
errant app I'm working on. This app sometimes has
no limit to its hunger when eating memory and cpu.
I can set monit to check the process every number
of seconds for too much memory use and kill it.

Regards,

Anton.