+CC so this doesn't get lost On 21.12.2015 13:35, Marcin Szewczyk wrote: > Hi, > > In 2010 I noticed that viewing many GIFs in a row using gpicview renders > my Linux unresponsive. There is very little I can do in such a > situation. Rarely after some minutes the OOM killer kicks in and saves > the day. Nevertheless, usually I end up using Alt+SysRq+B. > > This is the second computer I can observe this problem on. First was > Asus EeePC 1000 with Atom N270 and now I have Lenovo S210 with Celeron > 1037U. > > What happens is gpicview exhausting whole available memory in such a > pattern that userspace becomes unresponsive. I cannot switch to another > terminal either. I have written a tool that allocates memory in a very > similar way using GDK -- https://github.com/wodny/crasher. > > I have also uploaded some logs to the repository -- top, iostat (showing > a lot of reads during an episode), dmesg. > > I suppose the OS starts to oscillate between freeing memory, cleaning > caches and buffers, and loading some new data (see iostat logs). > > Currently I am using Debian Jessie with the following kernel: > 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u6 (2015-11-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux > > I can observe the most impressive effects on my physical machine > (logs/ph-*). On a VM (logs/vm-*) usually the OOM killer kills the > process after a short time (5-120 seconds). > > Possible factors differentiating cases of recovering in seconds from > recoveries after minutes (or never): > - another memory-consuming process running (e.g. Firefox), > - physical machine or a VM (see dmesg logs), > - chipset and associated kernel functions (see dmesg logs). > > Things that seem irrelevant (after testing): > - running the application in Xorg or a TTY, > - LUKS encryption of the root filesystem, > - vm.oom_kill_allocating_task setting. > > What can I do to diagnose the problem further? > > > (Sorry if a duplicate appears) > -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>