If the memory runs out the kernel just use an agent which will try to free some memory by killing those processes which are both old and fat (i.e. use a lot of memory for too long). Every process comes with a score which is constantly updated by the kernel. You can view the score by lurking in /proc/$PID/oom_score.

This article briefly describes how you can find out which process has the biggest change to being killed in a “out of memory” event and how to protect those which are required (e.g. ssh daemon for a remote machine) .

When the OOM killer is called, the process which will most likely be the first victim, is the one with the top score. Here is a little bash script that will show you the running processes sorted by score in ascending order:

Eee BOX Front view

Ieri ho acquistato il nuovo gioiellino di casa Asus, uno dei piu’ compatti pc desktop che stupisce per prestazioni , qualita’ e prezzo.
L‘Asus Eee BOX (marchiato B202 sulla confezione) ha le seguenti caratteristiche tecniche:

If you have problems (i.e. blank or green screen or the error “main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `XVID’” in vlc) viewing XviD videos in Debian Lenny and you are using debian-multimedia repository then here is how to solve temporarily the problem.

What we are going to do now is to downgrade the minimum set of libraries for restoring vlc/totem capability to play videos. In addition we will tell apt-get not to upgrade those libraries next time we run apt-get upgrade. The latter is just temporary, as hopefully the problem will be solved in a few days weeks (months?).

Here is the two simple commands: