Re: OOM problems on 2.6.12-rc1 with many fsx tests

Andrew Morton
2005-03-23T23:43:44Z

"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.

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