Fighting fork bombs

Posted Mar 31, 2011 7:43 UTC (Thu) by alonz (subscriber, #815)
Parent article: Fighting fork bombs

This mechanism appears to be very naive, and is easily bypassed.

For example: it is easy to develop a “creeping” fork-bomb that will just wait 30s (or even 1m, or 5m) between spawning successive generations of children. When this bomb begins to make its impact, it will already have tens (or hundreds, or thousands) of children, and the history will be long gone.

Fighting fork bombs

Posted Mar 31, 2011 11:10 UTC (Thu) by dholland (subscriber, #14680) [Link]

I haven't read the patch and I'm not familiar with kernel code... but this looks like it would catch the most common (non-malicious) forkbombs, which in my experience are usually due to user error.

(and something about not letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good"?)