slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Bill Nottingham]

Havoc Pennington (hp at redhat.com) said: 
> Maybe a cap on process size, so there can be 1G virtual memory but an
> individual app can only use 512M? Maybe when a process reaches 512M we
> could suspend it and ask the user whether to 
> let it grow further?

You can set rlimits; you can also turn off overcommit. Doesn't help
the yum/rpm case, of course.

Bill