Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: OOM problems on 2.6.12-rc1 with many fsx tests

[Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>]

Andrew Morton wrote:

> "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com> wrote:
> 
>>>>Nothing beats poking around in a dead machine's guts with kgdb though.
>>>
>>>Everyone his taste.
>>>
>>>But I was surprised by
>>>
>>>
>>>>SwapTotal:     1052216 kB
>>>>SwapFree:      1045984 kB
>>>
>>>Strange that processes are killed while lots of swap is available.
>>
>>I don't think we're that smart about it. If we're really low on mem, it
>>seems we invoke the OOM killer whether processes are causing the problem
>>or not. 
>>
>>OTOH, if we can't free the kernel mem, we don't have much choice, but 
>>it's not really helping much ;-)
>>
> 
> 
> I'm suspecting here that we simply leaked a refcount on every darn
> pagecache page in the machine.  Note how mapped memory has shrunk down to
> less than a megabyte and everything which can be swapped out has been
> swapped out.

That makes sense. We have almost 485MB in active and inactive caches,
but we are not able reclai them :(

Active:         243580 kB
Inactive:       242248 kB

> 
> If so, then oom-killing everything in the world is pretty inevitable.
>