I've never used Linux much (sure, I've used many flavors of Unix, many of them extensively -- just not Linux). ):

Thanks. Upon further reflection, I think you may be right. I think I'm just lucky at finding what look like fairly well-written programs that can be coerced into nearly locking up NT while also hogging the CPU. These must be doing something kernelish as well? While a fairly simple endless loop will lock up my Win98 desktop (even though in a 32-bit program), WindowsNT only becomes a bit sluggish.

As for Unix (and other multi-user) systems, my experience differs from yours. I tend to run such systems in a true multi-user fashion where root never does casual things and non-root users have limits on number of processes, max VM, etc. to prevent accidental system lock-ups. Also, root, the console login, and networking have higher priorities so important things can be done when the system is in trouble. The worst system effect from mere mortal users I've seen there are fork() bombs, but I've managed to recover from those more easily than I have from nearly-lock NT.

I can't decide what you mean by NT surviving "memory starvation". Without defragging the swap file, NT can easily become quite sluggish if forced to page a lot. And once you have actually run out of page file space under NT you can no longer trust major components of the system and should reboot soon (in my experience).

While my experience with Unix systems is that performance under heavy paging is more linear and a given process running out of swap space quickly dies so you know who you can trust (and the kernel is protected from such things).

Now, I'm not trying to claim that Unix is better than NT or even vice versa. I started this just griping about a pet peeve of mine that I aquired because of Remotely Possible but that I've seen repeatedly since. Thanks for helping me realize that it isn't just a CPU-hog problem.

P.S. When I said it takes hours to request NT to shut down, I wasn't exagerating. Resolution of this problem almost always requires cycling power. But I've seen it so much that I've actually spent the time to see if it was even possible to ever get NT to shut itself down (in some cases because I really wanted to save some changes!). Part of the problem here is that NT shuts down the desktop in such a sequential fashion. If the hog isn't one of the first processes to get the shutdown request, then we have to painstakingly wait for each process to slowly shutdown and possibly prompt the user before the shutdown request will even be sent to the hog. So if you get really lucky and the hog is the first process, it may only take you 20 minutes to receive and push the "End Task" button and get your system back. Otherwise it really can be hours before you give up on saving your 20 minutes of unsaved work and cycle power.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

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