> [ On Sunday, December 8, 2002 at 11:02:54 (-0800), Chuck Silvers wrote: ]

> > yes, the heuristic for determining when to start killing processes
> > when no swap is available doesn't work so well when there's no swap
> > configured.

I've never understood why a process that is behaving could randomly get
killed.

Doesn't it make more sense to simply return ENOMEM to the process requesting
memory, and let -it- deal with the problem?  The OS needs to keep reserved
enough stack, etc, to make sure it remains consistent.

But being killed arbitrarily by the OS is, well, rude. (!)

I must be missing something fundamental, as I know that the L-word OS also
kills arbitrary processes when it gets frisky and runs out of memory; in fact,
I had a web server running on the L-word OS, and when it killed a process,
it killed Apache!  Boo!

Thanks,  -Mike