Re: Improving OOM killer

Lubos Lunak
2010-02-03T21:22:19Z

On Wednesday 03 of February 2010, Balbir Singh wrote:
> * Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@suse.cz> [2010-02-03 13:10:27]:
> > On Wednesday 03 of February 2010, Balbir Singh wrote:
> > > 2. RSS alone is not sufficient, RSS does not account for shared pages,
> > > so we ideally need something like PSS.
> >
> > Just to make sure I understand what you mean with "RSS does not account
> > for shared pages" - you say that if a page is shared by 4 processes, then
> > when calculating badness for them, only 1/4 of the page should be counted
> > for each? Yes, I suppose so, that makes sense.
>
> Yes, that is what I am speaking of
>
> > That's more like fine-tunning at
> > this point though, as long as there's no agreement that moving away from
> > VmSize is an improvement.
>
> There is no easy way to calculate the Pss today without walking the
> page tables, but some simplification there will make it a better and a
> more accurate metric.

OOM should be a rare situation, so doing a little amount of counting
shouldn't be a big deal. Especially if the machine is otherwise busy waiting
for the HDD paging stuff out and in again and has plenty of CPU time to
waste.

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