Memory and Paging

[Ansgar Burchardt]

Hi,

John Hubbard <ender8282 at yahoo.com> writes:

> My computer has some memory.  When I need more memory than the computer 
> writes some of the stuff in memory to the hard drive to free up the 
> memory.  This is troublesome because the hard drive is very slow.  While 
> moving stuff around the computer often slows way down since there is no 
> free memory.  To fix things I often need to kill the run away task.  
> (Usually some code that I have written that is misbehaving or behaving 
> properly, but using more memory than I expected.)  When in this state, 
> it often takes a very long time to ssh into the machine to kill the task 
> in question.  I am trying to figure out a solution to this problem.  It 
> seems like I would need to do a few things. 

If you know which program grabs much memory and you know it should not
do this when working normally, you can limit the amount of memory
available to this program.

Take a look at the `ulimit' shell command and the `setrlimit(2)'
function.

Regards,
Ansgar

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