Re: Memory overcommit

["Vedran Furač" <vedran.furac@gmail.com>]

David Rientjes wrote:

> There's advantages to either approach, but it depends on the contextual 
> goal of the oom killer when it's called: kill a rogue task that is 
> allocating more memory than expected,

But it is wrong at counting allocated memory!
Come on, it kills /usr/lib/icedove/run-mozilla.sh. Parent, a shell
script, instead of its child(s) which allocated memory. Look, "test"
allocates some (0.1GB) memory, and you have:

% cat test.sh

#!/bin/sh
./test&
./test&
./test&
./test

% perl check_badness.pl|sort -n|g test

26511   7884    test
26511   7885    test
26511   7886    test
26511   7887    test
53994   7883    test.sh

// great, so test.sh "is" the bad ass, ok, emulate OOMK:

% kill -9 7883

// did we kill "a rogue task"

% perl check_badness.pl|sort -n|g test

26511   7884    test
26511   7885    test
26511   7886    test
26511   7887    test

// nooo, they are still alive and eating our memory!

QED by newbie. ;)

> or kill a task that will free the most memory.

.