6 ms·

So, when there is no memory and no swap space available, instead of crashing, it zombifies whole system? This is weird.

• keeperofdakeys 14y ago
  The linux Out Of Memory killer would have activated (if not disabled). This program derives a 'score' for each program, based on a number of statistics, and kills the process with the highest score. Although it usually makes the right choice, sometimes it can kill innocent programs.
  • jws 14y ago
    It was worse than a dead sshd. Looks like something kernel-ish died badly. There was one more cron message in the syslog after this, but then nothing until I rebooted. Console unresponsive, no ping answering. Nov 2 21:29:33 gvdev kernel: [15115318.546376] fail[17150]: segfault at 7fffe9cbc1e0 ip 00000000004006fe sp 00007fffe9cbb1d0 error 4 in fail[400000+1000]