Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Tim Wright
2001-03-23T23:57:27Z

Netscape 4 has some very nasty habits like suddenly consuming ~80MB of memory.
Disabling java support seems to eradicate most occurences of this particularly
obnoxious behaviour. Under these circumstances, the OOM killer is doing exactly
the right thing i.e. killing a runaway app.

Tim

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 03:20:41PM -0500, Tom Diehl wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> > Well, in that case you'll have to live with the current OOM
> > killer. Martin wrote down a pretty detailed description of
> > what's wrong with my algorithm, if it really bothers him he
> > should be able to come up with something better.
> >
> > Personally, I think there is more important VM code to look
> > after, since OOM is a pretty rare occurrance anyway.
>
> Well actually it is not that rare at least for me. Every 3 or 4 days I run
> into it (It happened again this morning). The machine has 128 Megs of ram
> and 256 Megs of swap. It is my desktop machine and I keep 3 or 4 netscape
> windows running all of the time. Well I try to at least. Every 3 or 4 days
> the OOM Killer kills netscape, it happened this morning. If I could fix it
> I would but alas I do not have the knowledge. The best I can do is test. :(
>
> This is NOT a complaint I just bring this up as another data point.
> It used to lock the machine so things are getting better. fwiw, I am
> currently running 2.4.2-ac18. The old ac kernels (do not remember exactly
> which ones but it was single digits) would allow the machine to start
> thrashing. I could usually see that it was running out of memory and if I
> was fast enough could kill Netscape b4 the machine locked. If I was not
> fast enough it would lock hard. Nothing in the logs.
>
> HTH,
>
> --
> ......Tom ATA100 is another testimony to the fact that pigs can be
> tdiehl@pil.net made to fly given sufficient thrust (to borrow an RFC)
> Alan Cox lkml 11 Jan 01
>
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--
Tim Wright - timw@splhi.com or timw@aracnet.com or twright@us.ibm.com
IBM Linux Technology Center, Beaverton, Oregon
Interested in Linux scalability ? Look at http://lse.sourceforge.net/
"Nobody ever said I was charming, they said "Rimmer, you're a git!"" RD VI