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Old 11-14-2008, 06:28 AM   #1
vvopenka
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Sep 2006
Location: Prague
Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04
Posts: 18

Rep: Reputation: 1
Preventing a process to freez my computer


Hi, I have a little problem and I cannot find an answer anywhere.
I'm developing my own application in C++ which does lots of calculations and uses FreeGLUT and GTK+. Sometimes I make an error and it gets into a neverending loop. This freezes my entire operating system. Btw. I'm using FC 5 and GNOME. I cannot kill the process, I cannot use mouse or keyboard, so I cannot run another terminal to kill it. It just gets stuck, or extremely slow.
Now, what I need. When starting this process in a terminal, I would need to tell my operating system, that this process is "bad" How can I run this process so that it cannot eat up all computing time of my operating system? Or maybe is there a demon, or something like that, which would kill it after some time? It's so stupid to restart my computer everytime this happens. I usually need two or three runs before I find the mistake.

Thanks for help.
Vasek
 
Old 11-14-2008, 07:25 AM   #2
vladmihaisima
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Registered: Oct 2002
Location: Delft, Netherlands
Distribution: Gentoo
Posts: 196

Rep: Reputation: 33
Here are some ideas:

- go to a text only console (press control-alt-f1, to return to X press control-alt-f7) and kill the process from there ? Sometimes, even if X is blocked the text console will work.

- ssh into your machine (if you have another machine close). I have seen machines completly blocked in which you could ssh and kill the ofending process

- if you use bash, "man bash" and search for ulimit (press '/' and the the string you want to search. ulimit can limit the resources the shell and it's children will use.

- use nice ("man nice" for more info)

Hope at least one idea works for you
 
Old 11-14-2008, 09:29 AM   #3
estabroo
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Registered: Jun 2008
Distribution: debian, ubuntu, sidux
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run it at a high nice level, that'll prevent it from hogging all your resources and effectively freezing your computer

nice -n 19 program
 
Old 11-18-2008, 05:51 AM   #4
vvopenka
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Registered: Sep 2006
Location: Prague
Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04
Posts: 18

Original Poster
Rep: Reputation: 1
Thank you all. nice was exactly what I was looking for. Now it does what it should and my OS already allows me to kill the process.
 
  


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