Comment 11 for bug 159356

I have had this problem for many years now. I am glad to see that other people are complaining about it. Let me add that at first I have tried to buy more RAM and disable swap, as it seemed that hard drive usage was what killed the machine. Nevertheless, as soon as I do something wrong in matlab, the system freezed really bad. Given a few seconds/minutes/hours, matlab eventually get killed automatically but the loss in productivity is tremendous. I have never understood what is going on, as I have no swap. Also, if large chunks of memory get requested, matlab issues an out of memory statement, but what seems to freeze the machine are little subsequent request of small amounts of memory. Something in the kernel is plain wrong to allow a process to eat up all of the resources. In my personal opinion, you will always regret eventually to have chosen to save money on RAM relying on swap, because of misuses like this. But I hate that something is still crossing my choice of not having swap somehow. I would pay to know exactly what is going on. I use ubuntu lucid with the 2.6.32 kernel.