On 25 May 1998, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:

> Gunnar Helliesen <gunnar@bitcon.no> writes:
> 
> > Anyone seen anything similar?
> 
> Yup.  I reported it a while back.  Ragge said he knew about it, and
> was hoping to be able to find a fix.  Haven't heard anything since.
> It's OK, as long as you don't try to do too much at one time.  If two
> or more "heavy" processes compete for resources (memory? CPU?), the
> system will hang.  Ragge thought it was running at least one process,
> so that if that process managed to complete and terminate, it would
> get back to normal.

I can add some more info in this.
The hang is because the system runs out of free memory. All processes that
need additional pages after that will hang.
I've seen it pretty often, and have been forunate enough to sometime have
an xterm running top in one window. top usually don't get any pagefaults,
so it happily continues to report stuff, and free memory have always been
zero at those times.

I've been trying to find the problem from time to time, without success.
I'm currently hoping that the new UVM (when it comes) might solve it.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol