Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 5, 2009 22:26 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Taming the OOM killer by dlang
Parent article: Taming the OOM killer

I think it would be useful to add swap space for 'emergency only' use. So if all physical RAM is free, the kernel starts refusing user space requests for more memory. However if a process wants to fork() the kernel can let it succeed, knowing that in the worst case there is swap space to back its promises.

It is rather a problem that merely adding swap space as available means it can then be used by applications just as willingly as physical RAM. Perhaps a per-process policy flag would say whether an app can have its memory allocation requests start going to swap (as opposed to getting 0 from malloc() when physical RAM is exhausted). Then sysadmins could switch this flag on for particular processes that need it.

Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 6, 2009 0:45 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The problem is that the system is more dynamic than that. Swap space is
moved to and from physical memory on demand; there is almost never much
free physical memory, because free memory is wasted memory, so the first
sign you get that you're about to run out of memory is when you're out of
*swap* and still allocating more (reducing the various caches and paging
text pages out as you go).