Re: Over-enthusiastic OOM killer.

Dave Jones (davej@suse.de)
Thu, 13 Dec 2001 14:10:01 +0100 (CET)


On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> >The oom killer just killed a bunch of processes on my workstation.
> >What I don't understand, is why this was deemed necessary, when
> >there was 400MB of buffer cache sitting around in memory, and 175MB
> >of free swap space unused. (66mb of swap was used)
>
> Ehh.. I bet you didn't have free swap.

Difficult to say after the killing, but even if that were the case,
why wasn't buffer cache pruned before the more drastic action ?

After the killing, there was 400MB of real memory, doing absolutely
nothing but holding cached data.

regards,
Dave

-- 
| Dave Jones.        http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs

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