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Message-Id: <200710150452.30939.rob@landley.net>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 04:52:30 -0500
From: Rob Landley <rob@...dley.net>
To: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
Cc: Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>,
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...eleye.com>,
Matthew Wilcox <matthew@....cx>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org,
Suparna Bhattacharya <suparna@...ibm.com>,
Nick Piggin <piggin@...erone.com.au>
Subject: Re: OOM killer gripe (was Re: What still uses the block layer?)
On Monday 15 October 2007 8:37:44 am Nick Piggin wrote:
> > Virtual memory isn't perfect. I've _always_ been able to come up with
> > examples where it just doesn't work for me. This doesn't mean VM
> > overcommit should be abolished, because it's useful more often than not.
>
> I hate to go completely offtopic here, but disks are so incredibly
> slow when compared to RAM that there is really nothing the kernel
> can do about this.
I know.
> Presumably the job will finish, given infinite
> time.
I gave it about half an hour, then it locked solid and stopped writing to the
disk at all. (I gave it another 5 minutes at that point, then held down the
power button.)
Lost about 50 open konqueror tabs...
> How much swap do you have configured?
2 gigs, same as ram.
> You really shouldn't configure
> so much unless you do want the kernel to actually use it all, right?
Two words: "Software suspend". I've actually been thinking of increasing it
on the next install...
> Because if we're not really conservative about OOM killing, then the
> user who actually really did want to use all the swap they configured
> gets angry when we kill their jobs without using it all.
I tend to lower "swappiness" and when that happens all sorts of stuff goes
weird. Software suspend used to say says it can't free enough memory if I
put swappiness at 0 (dunno if it still does). This time the OOM killer never
triggered before hard deadlock. (I think I had it around 20 or 40 or some
such.)
> Would an oom-kill-someone-now sysrq be of help, I wonder?
*shrug* It might. I was a letting it run hoping it would complete itself when
it locked solid. (The keyboard LEDs weren't flashing, so I don't _think_ it
paniced. I was in X so I wouldn't have seen a message...)
(To be honest, I can never remember how to trigger sysrq on a laptop keyboard.
Presumably X won't intercept it the way it does alt-f1 and ctrl-alt-del...)
Rob
--
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- Ken Thompson.
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