Re: Out of memory, but no OOM Killer? (2.6.9-ac11)

[Alan Cox]

On Gwe, 2004-11-26 at 22:47, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
> rsync seems to want lots of memory, yet the OOM killer doesn't strike.
> Subsequently, that machine died an ugly death until delivered by a
> power-cycle.
> 
> Why doesn't the OOM killer reap rsync?

The OOM killer is a very dumb (near useless) heuristic. You can turn it
off or switch to sane overcommit module by setting
/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory to
1 or 2 respectively.

In this case your bug looks like the 2.6.9 network problem in which case
if you are lucky -ac12 will have fixed it as I merged the stuff DaveM
recommended into that.

Alan

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