From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Balbir Singh Subject: Re: KVM and the OOM-Killer Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 17:58:01 +0530 Message-ID: <20100514122801.GH3296@balbir.in.ibm.com> References: <4BEBEE8F.9050508@jrcs.co.uk> <20100514073334.GE16563@miggy.org> <4BED056B.1080804@jrcs.co.uk> <20100514082106.GG3296@balbir.in.ibm.com> <4BED0D18.80209@jrcs.co.uk> Reply-To: balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org To: James Stevens Return-path: Received: from e28smtp02.in.ibm.com ([122.248.162.2]:38546 "EHLO e28smtp02.in.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753079Ab0ENM2P (ORCPT ); Fri, 14 May 2010 08:28:15 -0400 Received: from d28relay01.in.ibm.com (d28relay01.in.ibm.com [9.184.220.58]) by e28smtp02.in.ibm.com (8.14.3/8.13.1) with ESMTP id o4ECSDaU032566 for ; Fri, 14 May 2010 17:58:13 +0530 Received: from d28av04.in.ibm.com (d28av04.in.ibm.com [9.184.220.66]) by d28relay01.in.ibm.com (8.13.8/8.13.8/NCO v10.0) with ESMTP id o4ECSDQf3199158 for ; Fri, 14 May 2010 17:58:13 +0530 Received: from d28av04.in.ibm.com (loopback [127.0.0.1]) by d28av04.in.ibm.com (8.14.3/8.13.1/NCO v10.0 AVout) with ESMTP id o4ECSC6f005069 for ; Fri, 14 May 2010 22:28:13 +1000 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4BED0D18.80209@jrcs.co.uk> Sender: kvm-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: * James Stevens [2010-05-14 09:43:04]: > >Have you looked at memory cgroups and using that with limits with VMs? > > The problem was *NOT* that my VMs exhausted all memory. I know that > is what "normally" triggers oom-killer, but you have to understand > this mine was a very different scenario, hence I wanted to bring it > to people's attention. I had about 10Gb of *FREE* HIGH and 34GB of > *FREE* SWAP when oom-killer was activated - yep, didn't make sense > to me either. If you want to study the logs :- > I understand, You could potentially encapsulate all else - except your VM's in a small cgroup and frequently reclaim from there using the memory cgroup. If drop caches works for you, that is good too. I am surprised that cache allocations are causing lowmem exhaustion. -- Three Cheers, Balbir