Re: Kernels Out Of Memoy(OOM) killer Problem ?

[Xavier Roche]

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).

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/