RE: 1gb RAM + 1gb SWAP + make -j bzImage = OOM

Phil Oester
2002-01-08T05:13:01Z

The vmscan patch doesn't seem to help in the 'make -j' testcase.

Here's time of a couple runs:

2.4.17 vanilla

real 32m2.097s
user 9m51.800s
sys 3m47.700s

real 19m45.696s
user 9m55.820s
sys 2m32.170s

2.4.17 + vmscan patch

gave up waiting after 2 hours...never finished.

Unfortunately, box was not responsive enough to gather any useful
information. Perhaps not swapping enough???

-Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephan von Krawczynski [mailto:skraw@ithnet.com]
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 6:24 AM
To: Phil Oester
Cc: nknight@pocketinet.com; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: 1gb RAM + 1gb SWAP + make -j bzImage = OOM

On Sun, 6 Jan 2002 22:22:16 -0800
"Phil Oester" <kernel@theoesters.com> wrote:

> I've rerun this test a number of times, and cannot reliably reproduce
> the OOM - though it still does OOM occasionally. It never OOM's right
> after a bootup - usually the greatest chance of OOM is after 2 or 3
> consecutive runs without a reboot. Once it even froze the box and
> required a powercycle.
>
> I'm surprised you cannot OOM with 1gb RAM/256MB swap, as sometimes I'm
> over 900MB in swap - did you try consecutive runs, or just once and
then
> reboot between each run?

I tried just about everything I could think of and it never went in OOM.
Even
the first test I did were with several days uptime - meaning far away
from
"cleaning" reboot. I hate reboot :-)

> [...]
> Haven't yet tried Martin's patch - though since I can't reliably
produce
> the OOM, testing it wouldn't help much.

Well, take the other side: if you do not manage to OOM afterwards, even
at the
tenth consecutive try, there is probably something about the patch ...

Regards,
Stephan