23 Apr
2013
23 Apr
'13
12:09 a.m.
Craig Sanders wrote:
the trouble with relying on the OOM killer is that what it kills is semi-random...e.g. the bloated ram hog might be iceweasel or chromium, but it kills postfix or sshd or something else important.
Granted. You can tweak OOM to make it avoid / never kill certain processes -- Ubuntu does this for sshd by default. But IME the OOM killer gets it right most of the time, whereas in the same pathological cases, with swap, the system became unusuable enough that all I could do was hold down the power button -- obviously much worse. YMMV &c. To be fair, that was a long time ago, in the 2.6 years, and probably on a celeron or sempron and 7200 IDEs.