From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932226AbVHIIGe (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Aug 2005 04:06:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932464AbVHIIGe (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Aug 2005 04:06:34 -0400 Received: from gw.exalead.com ([84.233.148.29]:26098 "EHLO exalead.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932226AbVHIIGd (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Aug 2005 04:06:33 -0400 Message-ID: <42F863EC.3040908@exalead.com> Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 10:06:04 +0200 From: Xavier Roche Organization: Exalead User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 X-Accept-Language: fr, en-us, en, ja MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Kernels Out Of Memoy(OOM) killer Problem ? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org vinay wrote: > I have a problem with linux kernel's Out Of Memory (OOM) killer. > I wanted to know, is there any way that we can force OOM killer to send a signal other than SIGKILL to kill a process when ever OOM detects a system memory crunch. As far as I understand the kernel, oom is called when the system has no memory pages left, and MUST get one to continue normal (ie. kernel) processing. The kernel just do not have the time to execute some user-space code, it MUST get free pages where they are (and hence, kill immediately some innocent process). This condition should not occur without using overcommit. Are you sure you are not using overcommit ? (cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory) To dasable it: echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory Overcommit is quite dangerous on production systems, because it leads to oom kills on heavy loads (at least, this is what I experienced).