On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Gary Thorpe wrote:

> Its funny how people can rail about how a 0.5 sec delay on fork() when
> a process limit is reached is "punishing" processes unfairly but have
> no problem with killing them at random when memory is overcommited...so
> much for reliability: you can lock up/crash/reboot *BSD or Linux
> systems with a "malloc big memory, fork a bunch of times, then write to
> memory" 10-30 line program. Why not worry about these fork "bombs"?
> They seem like they are much more destructive.

The difference is that in the fork() case, we are talking about a case
where we have a way to report an error. In the memory exhaustion case,
because we support overcommit, there is not a way to report an error.

Take care,

Bill