On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Kerin Millar <kerfra...@fastmail.co.uk> wrote: > > The need for the OOM killer stems from the fact that memory can be > overcommitted. These articles may prove informative: >
A big problem with Linux along these fronts is that we don't really have good mechanisms for prioritizing memory use. You can set hard limits of course, which aren't flexible, but otherwise software is trusted to just guess how much RAM it should use. It would be nice if processes could allocate cache RAM, which could be preferentially freed if the kernel deems necessary. If some pages are easier to regenerate than to swap, this could also be flagged (I have a 50Mbps connection - I'd rather see my browser re-fetch pages than go to disk when the disk is already busy). There are probably a lot of other ways that memory use could be optimized with hinting. -- Rich
