Now let's be fair. Save the following and run it on virtually any *nix system: 
#! /bin/sh
# Tie up memory
perl -e 'push @big, 1 while 1'
# Breed
sh $0 &
# And be a real hog
while [ true ]
do
    $0
    sleep 1
done

[download]
I am pretty sure I have it right.

If I do, run it and unless ulimits have not been properly set you will see hogging in action!

Don't worry about taking hours to request that the system be properly shut down. You will need to do a hard reboot.

My experience is that NT has awful performance on switching processes. I believe that Linux switches processes faster than NT switches threads. However NT in my experience survives casual CPU and memory starvation much better than Linux does. Try a few test Perl scripts out and see if you don't find the same.

OTOH I have seen occasional badly behaved processes (Lotus Notes on a couple of systems comes to mind) which reduce NT to sheer misery. For instance there is some kind of locking conflict which leaves NT at 1% CPU usage.

In general denial of service is a hard problem to solve. NT has worse average behaviour but tries to handle some DoS situations. Linux has better average behaviour but does not even try to think about DoS. It is far too easy to get either into really sad obscure failure modes.

But hey, if reliability is your top concern, why aren't you running an AS 400?

In reply to RE (tilly) 1: Bad multitasking (RE: MacPerl???) by tilly
in thread MacPerl??? by curtisb

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