Re: Improving OOM killer

Balbir Singh
2010-02-03T17:01:35Z

* Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> [2010-02-03 09:49:18]:

> On 02/01/2010 05:02 PM, Lubos Lunak wrote:
>
> > In other words, use VmRSS for measuring memory usage instead of VmSize, and
> >remove child accumulating.
>
> I agree with removing the child accumulating code. That code can
> do a lot of harm with databases like postgresql, or cause the
> system's main service (eg. httpd) to be killed when a broken cgi
> script used up too much memory.
>
> IIRC the child accumulating code was introduced to deal with
> malicious code (fork bombs), but it makes things worse for the
> (much more common) situation of a system without malicious
> code simply running out of memory due to being very busy.
>

For fork bombs, we could do a number of children number test and have
a threshold before we consider a process and its children for
badness().

> I have no strong opinion on using RSS vs VmSize.
>

David commented and feels strongly about RSS and prefers VmSize.

--
Balbir