Re: slow OOM killing with 2.6.9?

[Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com>]

Chris Ross wrote:

> The OOM Killer is working properly again in 2.6.10-rc2-mm4. Could you 
> try that kernel and report whether it fixed your problems too?

I had to turn off HIGHMEM support (see other response) but I mangaged to 
reproduce it.

My testcase forks a single child, then both parent and child proceed to allocate 
and write to 3/5 of total system memory.  Swap is disabled.  There is barely 
anything else running, so only one hog should have to be killed.

With 2.6.10-rc2-mm4, I got the following results:


running as root:
trial 1:
both memory hogs as well as the xterm in which they were started were killed. 
In the process, the system was frozen for 14 seconds.

trial 2: both memory hogs killed, system frozen for 9 seconds

trial 3: both memory hogs as well as the xterm in which they were started were 
killed., system was frozen for 15 seconds.

running as regular user:
trial 1:
one hog killed, system hung for 8 seconds

trial 2:
both hogs killed, timing window killed, system hung for at least 15 seconds


Doesn't look like the oom killer is entirely fixed.

Chris