Re: Improving OOM killer

Lubos Lunak
2010-02-10T21:29:28Z

On Wednesday 10 of February 2010, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On 02/10/2010 03:54 PM, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > Which however can mean that not killing this system daemon will be
> > traded for DoS-ing the whole system, if the daemon keeps spawning new
> > children as soon as the OOM killer frees up resources for them.
>
> Killing the system daemon *is* a DoS.

Maybe, but if there are two such system daemons on the machine, it's only
half of the other DoS. And since that system daemon has already been
identified as a forkbomb, it's probably already useless anyway and killing
the children won't save anything. In which realistic case a system daemon has
children that together cause OOM, yet can still be considered working after
you kill one or a limited number of those children?

> It would stop eg. the database or the web server, which is
> generally the main task of systems that run a database or
> a web server.

--
Lubos Lunak
openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer
l.lunak@suse.cz , l.lunak@kde.org