Process end

I wrote a C program on my HP Pavilion 6635 running RedHat 7.1. It made heavy demands of system resources and was eventually end by the operating system. I have some ideas on how to rewrite the program so that it doesn't make so many demands, but I think it would still be useful to understand at what point the system decides to kill a process. The first time I ran the program, I was running Gnome and, according to top, the process had SIZE 122 MB, used 60.3 percent of CPU, 66 percent of MEM. Then kswapd showed up on top, percentage of CPU dropped to about 33 percent, MEM stayed about the same, and then it croaked. It got a little further with Gnome turned off, e.g. the SIZE got to about 260 MB. The machine has 192 MB of RAM. I think it was probably the demands on memory that end the program.

Since it runs better with Gnome off, maybe it would run even better if, instead of running it in level 5, I dropped down to single user mode, but that might be dangerous to the system as a whole.

So, how does Linux decide at what point to kill a program that runs correctly but uses too many system resources? -- Ignorantly, * Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and * comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.