On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 11:13:00AM -0700, Artem Belevich wrote:
> 1.5.2 *does* exibit the problem. When I ran 1.5.2 kernel with "options
> BUFCACHE=50" on a machine with 512M of RAM the system frequently was
> unresponsive when there was a lot of disk activity. I played around
> with BUFCACHE setting and had to bring it down to ~20 in order to make
> system usable for interactive work.

I had to power cycle a machine a month or two ago because unresponsiveness
during load. I had a program (I think it was nm or objdump) that went
wildly out of control. It grabbed a huge amount of memory and then
started swapping like mad. After it started I never even got a vt510
that is hooked up to recognize me hitting the return key. 

This is an extreme case, I'll admit. 
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
      'Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are inappropriate.  
 It is appropriate to be concerned about "responsibilities" and "service" 
 to the community.' -- RFC 1591, page 4: March 1994