[nylug-talk] RedHat AS4 and wacky out-of-memory behavior

[Frank D. Greco]

I had dual-proc/dual-core X86 rack go bonkers on me the other 
day.  For some reason, this box ran out of memory (it had about 8GB 
of RAM and 8GB of swap).

In the past, I've had Linux go psychotic on me when there's a 
low-memory condition.  This time scripts acted erratically, no-hupped 
Java apps decided to page like crazy (and act funky, like repeatedly 
connect to a messaging server) and processes were seemingly killed at random.

The syslog showed a long list of processes that it killed (seemed to 
be random to me).  One of the processes was init, which was quite surprising.

Is this semi-expected behavior when Linux (RH) is in a low-mem state?

Any insight is greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Frank G.
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