On Thu, 03 Feb 2000, Kelly Lynn Martin <kelly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 3 Feb 2000 19:33:31 +0100 (CET), Daniel.Egger@xxxxxxx said: > > If you have a shared maschine the best would be to let the > >administrator choose how much memory each user will get because > >users'll ALWAYS try to get what they can even if it makes no > >sense.... > > It might be a good idea to have a compile-time configuration option > for maximum cache size, I disagree. This would only encourage some users to re-compile their own version of the Gimp in a private directory in order to get around the hardcoded limits. Being a system administrator myself, I believe that an admin should always suggest some limits (and maybe use some social engineering to encourage users to respect these limits) but should avoid hard limits. Because most users do not like hard limits and they start wasting their time and the admins' time trying to work around them. > and it might also be a good idea for gimp to > check its ulimits and adjust its cache size so as to avoid running > over its data segment limit or maximum resident set size. Some > admins use these as a way to prevent resource hogging. That would be a good idea, indeed. If the limit on memory is rather low but there is still some room left on the disk, then it would be good to lower the tile-cache-size. This would ensure that the Gimp would not die prematurely because of malloc problems when it could have swapped some tiles to disk. On the other hand, if ulimits are used to limit the maximum file size or CPU usage, there is not much that we could do about it. Same if disk quotas are activated. The Gimp can have some control over its memory usage, but many parts of the code assume that the disk space is unlimited (or is not the main constraint). -Raphael
