alt Hacker NewsOOM killer often doesn't run soon enough for me; I've even left the machine for twenty minutes and it's still swapping hard.
And I do say "often" because it does sometimes work.
I have set all my Firefox processes near-maximum priority to kill for the OOM killer, but it didn't help.
Also don't forget about memory compression: only meaningful with overcommit.
Replies
kentonv • yesterday at 2:41 PM
They say swap is highly highly recommended even if you have plenty of memory.
I don't care, I disable it anyway. Have been doing so for decades. Never caused a problem.
immibis • yesterday at 2:43 PM
Run without swap or with very little swap. I'm serious. Your modern server has enough memory, way more than 4MB, and you care about consistent latency don't you? Also, swap is wearing our your SSD.
➕ show 2 replies
Yeah, you probably want something that activates a bit earlier. I think the issue is the OOM killer won't activate until essentially everything that can be paged out is paged out, and that includes most code pages, so the system enters a death spiral of paging code in and out and stops making progress towards a point where the OOM killer would kick in. There's userspace daemons like earlyoom that help a lot with this.