23 Apr
2013
23 Apr
'13
12:14 a.m.
Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
And it probably also antedates the improvements made to page reclaim in the kernel. There have been many VM changes since then, as documented at LWN. Of course, that won't help if the system truly is running out of memory.