[clug] Ubuntu 10.04 windows close for no apparent reason

[Daniel Pittman]

Matt Joiner <anacrolix at gmail.com> writes:
> On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 3:04 PM, David Tulloh <david at tulloh.id.au> wrote:
>> On 15/05/10 10:41, jhock wrote:
>>
>> > Sometimes when I do a mouse click the interface that I am using closes
>> > for no apparent reason.  For example, evolution closed when I deleted an
>> > email. This has happened twice on different sessions and different
>> > emails.
>> >
>> > Similarly Open Office 3.2 presentation closes every time I reach a
>> > certain custom animation in a slide show. ...
>>
>> You may be running out of RAM.
>>
>> Both applications you site aren't known for their low RAM use.
>> Additionally, your EEE PC probably won't be running with swap due to the
>> SSD hard drive.  So when you run out of RAM the kernel kills off
>> something to free it up, normally the program you are using.
>
> How do you get this killing behaviour? Everytime I get EOOM my system
> gradually crawls to a halt and locks up.

It comes for free out of the box, although you *might* be seeing the symptom
of over-allocating swap — which means that until the swap is exhausted, the
machine continues to "work" for some very slow values of work.

Some details: http://linux-mm.org/OOM_Killer

Anyway, if you have more than ~ 512MB of swap on a machine, these days, that
you don't suspend to disk you might want to reconsider that.

        Daniel

...or just tune up the badness of a few big but unimportant applications.
-- 
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