> I once suggested "cgroup'ing" (loosely speaking) the entire system into two rough buckets: one for SSH, with enough dedicated RAM that ssh will never get swapped, and one for everything else.
I feel like I've been waiting 25 years for someone to implement this by default in every operating system, and yet no one seems to do this. (Arguably iOS does this with Jetsam priorities, btw.) Why is it so hard to ensure that these base components get guaranteed RAM? It was always extra infurating on Windows, as you'd end up in swap hell and need to kill something because the computer is now running insanely slow; so you hit ctrl-alt-del and the UI would instantly respond with a menu that would work great... and then you'd click Task Manager, and rather than that functionality being implemented in that menu--or being designed to never swap--you would get thrown back into the swap hell in the hope that eventually the taskman would load. It was insane, and so easily fixed in numerous ways (the most simple probably being to add a trivial task manager that only had memory usage and a kill button in that OS escape menu).
> I feel like I've been waiting 25 years for someone to implement this by default in every operating system, and yet no one seems to do this.
Damn straight. The xbox builds of Windows do this too (so the console is still controllable when a game is running) and I swear the lack of control in desktop OSs (can't start Task Manager to kill the thing that's stopping you from starting anything) will kill desktop computing if mobile OSs increase their capabilities.
A device that isn't responsive to input is indistinguishable from the device being broken.
This principal of reserving resources for OAM is also something people should really think about in the network too. Provide some dedicated resources for OAM traffic. I’ve seen too many people be anti-QoS for no real reason (it’s too complicated for them, or surprisingly common is they believe QoS is for “dumb enterprises” or for “legacy telco service providers not us cool new guys”). This includes one very large well known cloud provider that still resisted this even after traffic from multiple DOS events interrupted their monitoring and management access.
For what it's worth, Control+Shift+Esc will bring up the Task Manager without roundtripping through the other menu. Won't help if the system is thrashing though.
I feel like I've been waiting 25 years for someone to implement this by default in every operating system, and yet no one seems to do this. (Arguably iOS does this with Jetsam priorities, btw.) Why is it so hard to ensure that these base components get guaranteed RAM? It was always extra infurating on Windows, as you'd end up in swap hell and need to kill something because the computer is now running insanely slow; so you hit ctrl-alt-del and the UI would instantly respond with a menu that would work great... and then you'd click Task Manager, and rather than that functionality being implemented in that menu--or being designed to never swap--you would get thrown back into the swap hell in the hope that eventually the taskman would load. It was insane, and so easily fixed in numerous ways (the most simple probably being to add a trivial task manager that only had memory usage and a kill button in that OS escape menu).