Re: OOM-killer going crazy.

[Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>]

On Tue, Jul 27 2004, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Ed Sweetman wrote:
> 
> >This is not the same problem as I and other are describing.  There is 
> >no free memory when the OOM killer activates in our situation.  The 
> >kernel has allocated all available ram and as such, the OOM killer 
> >can't kill the memory hog because it's the kernel, itself.  So the OOM 
> >killer kills all the big apps running ...but it's to no use because 
> >the kernel just keeps trying to use more until the cd is completed.   
> >After which the memory is still never released.
> >Your thread has nothing to do with mine.
> >
> 
> I believe it could be the same problem. Jan-Frode's system has all
> ZONE_NORMAL memory used up. The free memory would be highmem which
> would be unsuable for those allocations that are causing OOM.
> 
> The vfs_cache_pressure change could possibly be responsible for the
> problem...  I don't have the code in front of me, but I think it
> divides by 100 first, then multiplies by vfs_cache_pressure. I
> wouldn't have thought this would have such a large impact though.

Ed,

Can you please try Nicks suggestion? A vm problem makes sense to me,
what doesn't make sense is that we leak memory on some hardware while
burning and don't on others.

-- 
Jens Axboe