On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 16:52:03 -0600 (CST), you wrote:
>One thing I find disturbing about this whole debate is the assumption that
>the only valid response a program can make to running out of memory is to
>crash- and that it doesn't matter if the crash is a SEGV or a more
>controlled cleanup & exit.
>
>One can even imagine better responses a program might have to being unable
>to allocate memory than simply exit, too- initiating a garbage collection
>to free up it's own internal memory, or having a prepared dialog box that
>it can show that says "Unable to allocate memory- please close some other
>programs and try again".
It's too late for garbage collection at this point. I would prefer a
SIGTERM; the process can then attempt some sort of graceful exit (save
the current file, whatever), followed by a SIGKILL.
Someone suggested something similar to SIGDANGER to indicate low
memory, triggering any garbage collection routines you may have. This
would be a better approach; try SIGDANGER, see if that helped. If not,
SIGTERM. If that still hasn't freed anything, SIGKILL.
James.
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