Re: OOM killer kicks in after minutes or never

[Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>]

+CC so this doesn't get lost

On 21.12.2015 13:35, Marcin Szewczyk wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In 2010 I noticed that viewing many GIFs in a row using gpicview renders
> my Linux unresponsive. There is very little I can do in such a
> situation. Rarely after some minutes the OOM killer kicks in and saves
> the day. Nevertheless, usually I end up using Alt+SysRq+B.
> 
> This is the second computer I can observe this problem on. First was
> Asus EeePC 1000 with Atom N270 and now I have Lenovo S210 with Celeron
> 1037U.
> 
> What happens is gpicview exhausting whole available memory in such a
> pattern that userspace becomes unresponsive. I cannot switch to another
> terminal either. I have written a tool that allocates memory in a very
> similar way using GDK -- https://github.com/wodny/crasher.
> 
> I have also uploaded some logs to the repository -- top, iostat (showing
> a lot of reads during an episode), dmesg.
> 
> I suppose the OS starts to oscillate between freeing memory, cleaning
> caches and buffers, and loading some new data (see iostat logs).
> 
> Currently I am using Debian Jessie with the following kernel:
> 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u6 (2015-11-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> I can observe the most impressive effects on my physical machine
> (logs/ph-*). On a VM (logs/vm-*) usually the OOM killer kills the
> process after a short time (5-120 seconds).
> 
> Possible factors differentiating cases of recovering in seconds from
> recoveries after minutes (or never):
> - another memory-consuming process running (e.g. Firefox),
> - physical machine or a VM (see dmesg logs),
> - chipset and associated kernel functions (see dmesg logs).
> 
> Things that seem irrelevant (after testing):
> - running the application in Xorg or a TTY,
> - LUKS encryption of the root filesystem,
> - vm.oom_kill_allocating_task setting.
> 
> What can I do to diagnose the problem further?
> 
> 
> (Sorry if a duplicate appears)
> 

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