I have no direct answer to your question. Oom-killer should be triggered in a memory emergency, and not when there's enough free memory space.
Some notes though: A. oom killer doesn't randomly choose a process to kill.. I described the algorithm for choosing a candidate for killing in: http://www.held.org.il/blog/?p=18 (I *might* have missed something there, don't trust it 100%). B. I can't see why disabling the swap would help to AVOID oomkiller? Swap should ENLARGE the available memory space; disabling swap might cause triggering oomkiller more frequently. Maybe I misunderstood what you meant. - Oren On Thursday 17 January 2008 12:32, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Hi list, > > > I need the esteemed people's second opinion to a recommendation I gave a > client. > > > The setup: > > Machine with 16GB ram and a bit of swap, running 32bit gentoo with (as > far as I know) 3:1 memory split. > > > The symptoms: > > Every so often the oom-killer kicks in, for no apparent reason. The > processes it kills appear to be randomly chosen. Monitoring was not > turned on, but there is no reason to suspect the 16GB+swap were nowhere > near exhausted at the time. > > > My suggested diagnosis and recommendations: > > The kernel only has 1GB with which to work, which causes it to run out > of memory for managing the page tables. I recommended they: > > - As a first stage, disable the swap. > > - As a second stage - switch to a 64bit kernel > > > My question is whether my diagnosis makes any sense, and if not, whether > anyone has any better idea as to what might be the problem. > > > Also, is there any way to monitor how much kernel memory is in use? It > seems that monitoring the "LowTotal" and "LowFree" values in > /proc/meminfo may be what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure I'm reading > the docs proprely. > > > Shachar > > > ================================================================= > To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command > echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
