Re: OOM-killer going crazy.

Nick Piggin
2004-07-27T04:20:29Z

Ed Sweetman wrote:

> This is not the same problem as I and other are describing. There is
> no free memory when the OOM killer activates in our situation. The
> kernel has allocated all available ram and as such, the OOM killer
> can't kill the memory hog because it's the kernel, itself. So the OOM
> killer kills all the big apps running ...but it's to no use because
> the kernel just keeps trying to use more until the cd is completed.
> After which the memory is still never released.
> Your thread has nothing to do with mine.
>

I believe it could be the same problem. Jan-Frode's system has all
ZONE_NORMAL
memory used up. The free memory would be highmem which would be unsuable for
those allocations that are causing OOM.

The vfs_cache_pressure change could possibly be responsible for the
problem...
I don't have the code in front of me, but I think it divides by 100
first, then
multiplies by vfs_cache_pressure. I wouldn't have thought this would
have such
a large impact though.