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Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 5, 2009 15:44 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462)
In reply to: Taming the OOM killer by michaeljt
Parent article: Taming the OOM killer

I would rather have my system slow to an unusable crawl if I was confident that it would come out of it again at some point. Even then, I can still press the reset button, which is what I have usually ended up doing in OOM situations anyway.

On your home system this makes some sense, but all this goes out the window once you have to take service levels into account.

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Posted Feb 6, 2009 7:46 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Granted, but then you don't want random processes dying either. That can also have adverse affects on service levels. In that case you are more likely to want a system that will stop allocating memory in time.

Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 6, 2009 8:58 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

it's actually far easier to deal with processes dieing then the entire machine effectivly locking up in a swap storm.

you probably already have tools in place to detect processes dieing and either restart them (if the memory preasure is temporary) or failover to another box (gracefully for all the other processes on the box)