Your computer is a distributed system

Re:Your computer is a distributed system by bee_rider on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @03:00PM (#30859411)

Killing the processes running on the compute element seems not very graceful, right? I'd expect a gracefully handled failure to have some state staved from which the computation can be continued.

Which would be overkill on a single node, given that CPUs don't really fail all that often.

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Re:Your computer is a distributed system by catern on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @03:12PM (#30859573)

It's up to userspace to do more than that. There are other issues which can cause processes to be spontaneously killed (OOMkiller for example) so it's something you should be tolerant of.

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Re:Your computer is a distributed system by nickelpro on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @04:26PM (#30860355)

Disagree. An environment that's being reaped by OOMK is not stable enough to make assumptions about. You're in "go down the hall and turn it off and on again" territory.

Attempting to account for such environments in user programs massively inflates their complexity, does little to enhance reliability, and the resulting behavior is typically brittle or outright broken from the get go.

This is why, for example, the C++ committee flirts with making allocation failure a UB condition.

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Re:Your computer is a distributed system by astrange on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @11:57PM (#30863672)

iOS constantly runs an OOM killer and works pretty well.

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