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["Christopher M. Penalver" <christopher.m.penalver@xxxxxxxxx>]

** This bug is no longer a duplicate of bug 620074
   Thrashing turns system unusable

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/27441

Title:
  Prevent extended periods of thrashing

Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix
Status in “linux-source-2.6.15” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in “linux-source-2.6.22” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  Two days ago I clicked a torrent link in Epiphany which for some
  reason made one of the desktop applications eat a lot of memory. So
  the machine suddenly froze and started trashing. I waited about 10
  minutes, then gave up, pressed the power button and left. When I got
  back the next morning the machine had left swap hell, noticed the
  power button press and turned itself off.

  This made me think that perhaps it would be a good idea to somehow do
  something to prevent having the kernel  spend more than 10 minutes
  with the desktop in a totally frozen state. IMHO freezing everything
  for more than a few seconds does not make any sense on a desktop
  machine. It might be enough to set the ulimit settings to something
  sensible, e.g. so that no application can eat more than 90% of the RAM
  or more RAM than there will still be say 100 MB available for the
  desktop on the machine.

  I'm experiencing this on a fully upgraded Breezy Badger, the kernel
  seems to be 2.6.12-10-686.

  I previously reported this as bug #27392 for the kernel, but the
  maintainer rejected the notion that the kernel could do anything about
  it and suggested I filed a new bug. And yes, I realise that in some
  cases a default process limit will be wrong. I'm not arguing that
  everyone should have these settings forced down their throats, I'm
  arguing that the defaults are wrong. It is a lot easier to remove a
  protection if you need it than it is to protect the system yourself,
  and most people probably don't run real memory hogs like scientific
  simulations.

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