Re: configurability of OOM killer

On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 10:57 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:

> I tried bringing this up on LKML several times (Ron Mayer linked to one
> of my posts: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/2/9/275). If anyone has an inside
> connection to the linux developer community, I suggest that they raise
> this issue.
>
> If you want to experiment, start a postgres process with shared_buffers
> set at 25% of the available memory, and then start about 100 idle
> connections. Then, start a process that just slowly eats memory, such
> that it will invoke the OOM killer after a couple minutes (badness()
> takes into account the time the process has been alive, as well, so you
> can't just eat memory in a tight loop).
>
> The postgres process will always be killed, and then it will realize
> that it didn't alleviate the memory pressure much, and then kill the
> runaway process.

I think the badness() thing sucks badly too, but if we don't keep our
own house in order then they're not going to listen.

--
Simon Riggs
2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com