On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 4:16 PM, r.stricklin <b...@typewritten.org> wrote:
> > My experience doing so, however, was that it opened us up to > situations where I would start to see processes get pranged by the out- > of-memory desperation kill "feature", even though there was quite a > bit of memory still sitting unused. > OOM can be disabled with # echo "0" > /proc/sys/vm/oom-kill I know this sort of situation can happen with you're running 32 bit linux with large amounts of RAM (with Highmem enabled in the kernel) because linux splits the RAM into low memory (used by the kernel to track memory allocations and by applications) and high memory (used exclusively by applications), and when it runs out of low memory, it starts killing things, even if all the high memory is unused. 64 bit kernels don't have this problem because all memory is low memory. Enabling Hugemem in the kernel helps on 32 bit systems. I should note that OOM handling and memory overcommitting behavior have changed in newer kernels, and I'm not sure how it's handled now. Andrew ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
