Love this story! I had a similar experience, in that Summer '96 my work experience placement was an IT dept at a London hospital, and they had all manner of Sun SPARC stations and DEC Alpha boxes. After the 2 week placement (my sole task was to learn how to install Red Hat 3.0.3 (Picasso!) on a spare PC they had), they gave me the Infomagic Linux Developer's Resource as a gift, and I then spent another month getting it working on my Packard Bell PC ;-D. Anyway, having discovered Phrack magazine I found reference to the Cuckoo's Egg, and my local library carried it. It's still, to this day, the only book I've devoured in just over one day - and probably the only time I've ever hit flow state while reading. It was an amazing read - thank you, Cliff!
I’ve had great success with N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) which brings glutamate back into balance with GABA [1]. The upshot of this is, it’s reduced my binge-like behaviours massively, although I’m slightly more anhedonic than before.. or maybe just balanced now. Also clears the chest very rapidly. YMMV.
Good for you, but NAC has a host of effects so you couldn't say it was due to glutamate for sure.
For example, NAC mainly increases glutathione, the primary antioxidant your body uses, so it may reduce the level of oxidative stress and lower your body's stress response. It also increases the level of SAM-e in your body (as you can transform sulfur containing amino acids methionine and cysteine into each other). SAM-e is a crucial cofactor for many processes including creation of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. And an increase in sulfur amino acids (including NAC) also modulates your gut microbiome.
I am wondering, did you ever look at tuning MALLOC_ARENA_MAX? This sort of constant consumption of memory is fairly well aligned to the default tuning of MALLOC_ARENA_MAX, which is 8 * nproc.
We've just tuned it for a java-based app which was also stuck in OOMkill hell, and this has completely resolved the situation (MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2).
Avoiding the p1ssing contest is very important, as well as ensuring we don't have egotistical a-holes interviewing.
In a role we're currently interviewing for, we intentionally ask deep-dive style questions. We first explain our approach by telling the candidate we don't necessarily care about the answer; we seek to assess aptitude, rather than ability, and so we ask the candidate to be as vocal as possible to display their reasoning. So far, it has helped us narrow-down the pool to two promising candidates. Of course, we also mention in the interview that, "we'd make liberal use of google, and we understand that most other people would too" - but some of our better interviews have turned into pleasant, fruitful technical discussions, and not just a back-and-forth "pub quiz". Just my $0.02.
