On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 1:51 PM Robbie Harwood <rharw...@redhat.com> wrote: > > Another thought. Wouldn't some of the pain here be alleviated by > setting vm.swappiness=0?
My sample size is not scientific. But, in my testing I can't tell any difference for the swap under pressure case we're testing against. The system is lost in the same amount of time, system still does not recover on its own. Perhaps swappiness matters for the less extreme case of incidental swap usage, which is probably what swap was originally intended for (?) but that's speculation on my part. The central problem as I see it, unprivileged applications *by default* are given a memory allocation that they request, without any consideration for the health of other processes, even privileged processes. The kernel oom-killer (with or without earlyoom running), often clobbers things like sshd, systemd-journald, sssd, and even user space programs (Maps, TextEdit, Terminal) that have nothing to do with what's actually eating up CPU and memory. It's pretty atrocious, but I've editorialized plenty about that in the cited threads already. People smarter than I am are working on more long term solutions for this. This is a bit of a hack, intended to return some sense of control back to the user sooner, so they can save their state (however they define that) and reboot normally, rather than having to force power off. It's unsophisticated and therefore mismatched with a complex problem, but elegant because it's simple, easy to test, easy to remove or disable. Another plus I only briefly mention in the proposal, is that because the user is far less likely to hard power off, their system journal will have certainly recorded earlyoom's memory report leading up to the oom, as well as the complete kernel oom-killer output. Whereas in many of my tests without earlyoom, forced power off can cause a lot of this information to get lost, especially what action oom-killer took assuming it even triggered at all which often it doesn't and the system remained wedged in and unresponsive for 30+ minutes. >Currently it seems to be 60, which results in > somewhat aggressive swap use; 1 seems better (minimal swapping without > disabling), while 0 will disable it for general use (while preserving it > for hibernation). This would at least improve the disk thrashing during > OOM situations. Sounds right, but in practice I'm not observing this. The two observation perspectives I'm using: a) GUI responsiveness: ability to drag windows around, scroll in Firefox, type text in textedit, open/save files. b) remote (ssh) observation with vmstat, iotop, and top -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
