Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 16, 2007 11:48 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190)
In reply to: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek) by zooko
Parent article: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

> For example, suppose you overload your RAM and get into swap thrash. On Linux, you can do nothing but sit and fume and drum your fingers for minutes or tens of minutes until either (a) your attempt to get a shell and run "kill" or "top" finally succeeds, or (b) random processes get killed by the kernel.

The only time I have any experience comparable to this is when I've forgotten to enable swap space, and some stray process has malloc()d and touched so much memory all at once that the kernel can't even page in executables to run them (because without swap, it can't page *out* unused data pages).

When I enable swap, all such symptoms go away.

> On Windows XP, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and a nice GUI window pops up (the Task Manager) that lets you choose processes (or apps) to kill.

In contrast, I've been left with a thoroughly unresponsive XP box before now. The Task Manager may come up quickly enough and let you choose processes to kill, but when the selected processes refuse to die...

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