Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by foepys 1354 days ago
The old Windows Task Manager has code in it that killed other programs to be able to start so the user could kill more programs.

I don't know if this feature still exists in modern versions since memory has increased so much but I always found it to be neat that some developers thought about this.

3 comments

Sounds like a good idea for systems that are absolutely hammered. `htop` could add a `--kill` flag, or maybe `--kill-ram` / `--kill-cpu` which would first try to kill the most ram/cpu intensive application, and then load the UI.

I've ended up in a couple of situations where servers are so hammered it takes five minutes just to get a ssh session up and running because some process took up all CPU/RAM and was barely able to do anything in the server itself. Something like that could maybe help.

David Plummer wrote the Windows Task Manager, he made a 3 part series on his YouTube channel [1]. It's a fascinating couple of videos, highly recommend to watch.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8VBOiPV-_M

Basically kill -9