Re: Fix for wrong OOM killer trigger?

Roland Bless
2003-09-20T11:09:36Z

On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 09:25:44PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> can you try with 2.4.22aa1? the oom killer there will only work on tasks
> that are allocating memory, not on idle daemons, so the probability of
> killing rsync first should be higher. stock SuSE 8.1 kernel should do
> the same too.

This will only help to avoid not shooting important daemons.
The real cause, however, seems to be that the filesystem cache
memory is not properly re-used when it should, or, that it tries to
allocate a huge amount memory. The programs themselves do not
allocate much memory! It must be the system, because I also
ran programs with memory restrictions by ulimit. The programs
are definitely not allocating the memory, and, 4GB RAM are really
enough for a simple file server like ours.

Regards,
Roland