From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 02:20:48 +0100 From: "Stephen C. Tweedie" Subject: Re: [PATCH] a simple OOM killer to save me from Netscape Message-ID: <20010414022048.B10405@redhat.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: ; from riel@conectiva.com.br on Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 01:20:07PM -0300 Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" , Slats Grobnik , linux-mm@kvack.org, Andrew Morton List-ID: Hi, On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 01:20:07PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote: > What we'd like to see is have the OOM killer act before the > system thrashes ... if only because this thrashing could mean > we never actually reach OOM because everything grinds to a > halt. It's almost impossible to tell in advance whether the system is going to stabilise on its own when you start getting into a swap storm. Going into OOM killer preemptively is going to risk killing tasks unnecessarily. I'd much rather leave the killer as a last-chance thing to save us from eternal thrashing, rather than have it try too hard to prevent any thrashing in the first place. If the workload suddenly changes, for example switching virtual desktops on a low memory machine so that suddenly a lot of active tasks need swapped out and a great deal of new data becomes accessible, you get something that is still a swap storm but which will reach equilibrium itself in time, for example. --Stephen -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/