OOM, This toilet cleaner smells good [LWN.net]

OOM, This toilet cleaner smells good

Posted Jun 11, 2010 15:35 UTC (Fri) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998)
Parent article: Another OOM killer rewrite

This sounds like one toilet cleaner that I'll be happy to receive! I just look forward to an OOM killer that will do its job in less time than it takes me to log in to a swap-thrashing system, get frustrated an hit the reset button.

Kudos to Andrew Morton for ignoring "nacks" with no supporting comments.

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OOM, This toilet cleaner smells good

Posted Jun 14, 2010 21:13 UTC (Mon) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]

As commented above, the OOM killer is not designed to fix the swap-trashing problem you describe, the OOM killer is designed to fix the problem when your system is so active that you run out of *both* RAM and swap. Only then will OOM killer be activated at all.

For your problem, the solution is to greatly reduce you swap size, reduce the 'swappiness' value of your kernel and also implement the "don't cache disc access by this process" feature and mark you overnight cron jobs with that bit.