How do you prevent an application from grinding the whole system to a halt?

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 11:55 +0700, Chanchao wrote:
> While rotating though, The Gimp managed to bring everything down.
> Nothing responded anymore

In all probability, it was only X that was stuck. If CTL-ALT-F1 doesn't
get you to a console (wait at least a minute before giving up on that!)
then about your only option other than pulling the plug is to try
logging in from another machine and killing X (see if just killing the
Gimp helps first though).

You could set up a "dead man switch" relatively easily. Write a script
that asks for input and if it doesn't get it in (say) 20 seconds, kills
X. If it does get input, it exits with no action. Pop that up in a
terminal via cron at half-hourly intervals. That's pretty drastic
though.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (w/h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)