Re: Complete lock-up from using pkgsrc/net/darkstat

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	hello.  Mouse's thought is a good one as well.  I'll note, for example, it's pretty easy
to send a machine to hang heaven with vi(1).  Edit a very large file, say one  of 3 gigs in
size.  Then, pick a starting line a quarter of the way down the file and mark it.   Move down
the file and pick a line 3 quarrters of the way through the file.  Now, try and delete the
lines from your starting line to your ending line.  Vi will balloon to a huge virtual memory
size and, most likely, cause the NetBSD host to hang hard with no messages to the console.  It
seems like uvm should kill such processes, and in some cases it will, but in my experience, it
often does not, with host killing results.  The same unhappy result can also be achieved by
killing a long running named process that has grown to a huge virtual memory size.  In this
case, the system is doing something similar to what Mouse describes for core files, but instead
it's doing it as paart of the process cleanup procedure.

-thanks
-Brian