March 21, 2010: A killer has been stalking the night. Not very effectively, because the only place to hide from the night is in plain sight, but... Or, in plainer language, a little while back I woke up to find that the oomkiller had started going crazy in my sleep and killed a number of perfectly innocent xterms full of perfectly innocent vims. A lesser person than myself might have given in and taken the DIMM currently resting in the aidsbox (... turns out there was a REASON why someone threw out a working dual-core 3.5GHz 64bit pentium computer. And not the usual 'windows is full of viruses' one - the motherboard model is notorious enough for problems that google offered it up on autocomplete partway through my typing it and Fry's was giving them away free if you bought a CPU a few years back. AND the power supply overheats due to a dodgy fan.) and thus upgraded his main machine to 2gigs. However, even with 2gigs I'm still plagued by occasional ooms just because I do harmless things like try to have fifty tabs open at once. So. Oomer is a Linux app to check for low memory and, when it finds your memory is low, kill and/or freeze processes. All user-configurable, if you're reasonably technical, and much more suited to the typical desktop user than the Kenny-killing kernel patch that was suggested a few years back. And I learned enough of the Xwindows API to make it actually pop up alerts when it's killing things (because having your browser pause for no apparent reason would be almost as annoying as an oom.).

{ Add Comment }