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Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

A (GUI) app forking out of control

Hi,

Sometimes, not very often, a (gui) app goes berserk forking itself. It happened twice to me (KDE). Once it continued forking even after reboot (I can't remember exactly how it ended ), another time I found my KDE configuration damaged after reboot. It forks faster than you can kill new instances; reboot is dangerous.

Is there a proper way to deal with this emergency?

jac

Member

From: /home/jac

Registered: 2009-05-19

Posts: 431

Website

Re: A (GUI) app forking out of control

I'm not sure how to fix the actual problem, but I know you can help limit fork-bomb's damage by setting up limits in /etc/security/limits.conf  Then, if it happens you can login as root (if the limit is low enough that you can do anything else) and killall the process. [Edit: actually, if you can kill any of the processes, I think just a killall might be enough]

Do you know which app it is, or does it vary?

Last edited by jac (2010-03-31 13:07:08)

Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

Re: A (GUI) app forking out of control

Do you know which app it is, or does it vary?

Once it's been printscreen or whatever in KDE3, another time, quite recently, Firefox, of all things . Both apps turned out to be not fool proof enough in the area of mouse clicking in unlikely places at unfortunate times.

BTW, nproc limit seems to be impracticable in this day and age, as a DE runs more than 200 processes at all times.

Last edited by Llama (2010-03-31 14:50:57)