When a process uses too much memory, the system freezes

[Aniello Gatta]

Hello to all,
It routinely happens that the system freezes when a process uses
too much memory and so consumes near all the memory in the system
(eg. newer releases of Firefox or big compile sessions)

On this system, I can reproduce this scenario on demand.
My system config:
- Pentium 4 Northwood 2.0 Ghz
- 512 MB Rambus memory
- 20 GB hd, I'm using UFS by the way
- DragonFly 3.5-DEVELOPMENT 20 April build (i386)

Using stress (I installed it from dports) if I create a stress virtual memory job
that eats all the system memory using a command like this:

# stress --vm-bytes 600M -m 1

I can get the system to freeze! and it happens even if I use a 256MB swapfile
and consume all the memory + the swap.

Any insights?? It could be due to the 16MB reserve for DMA??

Anyhow, thanks for this great operating system :)

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