RE: Expectations of MEM requirements for a DB with

>> Anyway, I crashed my system the other day when I did a "select *" from
>> one
>> of my large tables (about 5.5gb in size).
>
> Well.... It takes abit more than that to actually crash the system. Can
>you give more details? What _exactly_ happened? Did it hang? Kernel
>panicked? Something else.

Actually, I was watching this convo on another message board. When linux
hits low memory situations (i.e. none) it thrashes for far longer than it
should have to, just to free some up. In this way, NT and other OS's are
much better - they can run with no memory available, very slowly, but
without waiting 2 hours for processes to time out. For all intents and
purposes, you will get your box back quicker with linux by rebooting than
waiting a few hours for it to respond. I'm not posting that here as a gripe,
but to support the guy who said it "crashed".

Rob Nelson
rdnelson(at)co(dot)centre(dot)pa(dot)us