On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 10:01:18AM -0600, Jim C. Nasby wrote: > BTW, I was shocked when I found out that FreeBSD actually has an OOM > killer itself. Yet I've never heard of anyone having problems with it. > Granted, the FreeBSD OOM could be better designed to pick the right > process to kill, but I'd bet that the real reason you never hear about > it is because FreeBSD admins are clued enough to a) setup a reasonable > amount of swap and b) do a better job of monitoring memory usage so that > you don't start swapping in the first place.
Hmm, I do wonder what FreeBSDs overcommit policy is. For example on my computer right now the total allocated VM is approximately 3 times the actual memory in the computer and about twice if you include swap. By a strict policy of overcommit my computer wouldn't complete the boot sequence, whereas as currently it runs without using any swap. Disabling overcommit has a serious cost in that most of your VM will never be used. Are people really suggesting that I can't run a few daemons, X and a web-browser on FreeBSD without allocating 3 times my physical memory in swap? However, my real question is: while trying to find info about FreeBSDs overcommit policy, I just get lot of people complaining about freebsd killing random processes. Does anyone know a site that describes how it works? I understand Linux's overcommit policy just fine. Disclaimer: The Linux OOM killer has never killed the wrong process for me, so I don't have any bad experiences with overcommit. Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a > tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone > else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
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