On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 13:31 -0800, Ron Mayer wrote: > Alvaro Herrera wrote: > > Yeah, the only way to improve the OOM problem would be to harass the > > Linux developers to tweak badness() so that it considers the postmaster > > to be an essential process rather than the one to preferentially kill. > > Wouldn't the more general rule that Jeff Davis pointed out upstream > make more sense? > > That shared memory of the children should not be added to the size > of the parent process multiple times regardless of if something's > an essential process or not. Since those bytes are shared, it > seems such bytes should only be added to the badness once, no? > > > (assuming I understood Jeff correctly)
Yes, that is exactly my complaint. I am not trying to delve into the heuristics used by badness. It is not some subtle thing that I think linux should tweak in the favor of postgresql. I just see something that (as I see it) is clearly wrong with the calculation that they are using, and I want linux to fix it. It's very easy to see, if you look at the badness algorithm, that even a well- behaved idle postgresql daemon (or any other software of similar architecture) will almost always be the target of the OOM killer -- even if another process has a larger VM size (larger than postgresql *including shared memory*, just to be clear) and is growing. And I can demonstrate the problem with a simple test, too. Regards, Jeff Davis ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly