[nylug-talk] RedHat AS4 and wacky out-of-memory behavior

[Frank D. Greco]

At 06:03 AM 4/3/2008, Sunny Dubey wrote:
>On Wednesday 02 April 2008 09:42:14 pm Frank D. Greco wrote:
> > The syslog showed a long list of processes that it killed (seemed to
> > be random to me).  One of the processes was init, which was quite
> > surprising.
> >
> > Is this semi-expected behavior when Linux (RH) is in a low-mem state?
>
>When linux runs out of all available memory, its VM uses a feature
>called "Out of Memory Killer" (aka OOM Killer), which kills any process
>attempting to allocate additional memory, and (possibly) idle low
>priority processes as well.
>
>The kernel's VM has been fixed long ago to not kill init and some other
>types of processes deemed important as well.  (Since like the later linux
>2.4x series or so.)  You may wish to see if they are upgraded kernels for
>your distro or just roll your own update.

         Thanks for the info Sunny and Bryan!  Your posts were very helpful.

         Who the heck thought that killing init when the kernel was running
         out of memory in the first place was a good idea?  Sheesh...

         Frank G.
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