Re: OOM-killer going crazy. (was: Re: memory not released after using cdrecord/cdrdao)

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Jan-Frode Myklebust wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 09:30:38PM -0400, Ed Sweetman wrote:
> 
>>Indeed, i burned a smaller cd and got very similar results.  
> 
> 
> Same here.. After upgrading to 2.6.8-rc2 the OOM-killer is going crazy.
> It's particularly angry at the backup client 'dsmc' (from Tivoli Storage
> Manager).  I'm monitoring its usage with 'top', and 'dsmc' is not using
> more than ~150MB in either size or RSS when the OOM-killer takes it down.
> 
> The 'dsmc'-process is reporting that it's processed 2,719,000 files, and
> transfered 164.34 MB when it gets killed. i.e. it's traversed a lot of
> files, but only read about 164 MB data, so it shouldn't have filled up any
> buffer cache... 
> 
> The system still has lots of free memory (~900 MB), and also 2 GB of
> unused swap. Actually there's 0K used swap..??  
> 
> I've tried turning on vm.overcommit_memory, but it had no effect. Also
> tried changing the swappiness both up to 90% and down to 10%, but it
> never uses any swap.. ???
> 
> BTW: I had no OOM-killer problems on 2.6.7.
> 

Can you just check you CONFIG_SWAP is on and /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode is 0,
and that you have some swap enabled.

If the problem persists, can you send a copy each of /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state,
/proc/slabinfo and /proc/vmstat before and after you run dsmc until it goes
OOM please?

Thanks.