Re: Runaway process and oom-killer

[John Sigler <linux.kernel@free.fr>]

Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 10:49:29AM +0200, John Sigler wrote:
>
>> Question 2: how can I tell which process or kernel thread was hogging 
>> most of the RAM when the oom-killer kicked in?
> 
> Theoretically the one that was killed first but not for sure in
> current mainline hence see below.

If I read the logs correctly, oom-killer is "invoked" three times before 
it effectively kills a process. Then oom-killer kills myapp, syslogd, 
and boa, in that order. Why didn't oom-killer kill anything the first 
three times?

>> Question 3: if myapp was hogging the RAM, then why did oom-killer snipe 
>> other processes (syslogd and boa) after it killed myapp?
> 
> Please try again after applying this monolith (proper submission was
> on linux-mm but the monolith is easier to apply for tests like this):
> 
>    http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/patches/v2.6/2.6.22-rc4/oom-fixes-1

Would this patch apply to a 2.6.20.7-rt8 source tree?

Regards.