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It's fine until you run out of disk space
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Does the OOM killer actually work for anyone? In every linux system I've used, if I run out of memory, the system simply freezes.
Absolutely can and will take action. Doesn't always kill the right process (sometimes it kills big database engines for the crime of existing), but usually gives me enough headroom to SSH back in and fix it myself.
I have limited experience with Linux, but why is it that when my system locks up, SSH still tends to work and let me fix things remotely? Like, if the system isn't locked up, let me fix it right here and now and give me back control, if it is locked up, how is SSH working to help me?
Yes, it takes surprisingly long for the OOM killer to take action, but the system unfreezes. Just wait a few minutes and see whether that does the trick.
Yes. If you have swap the system will crawl to a halt before the process is killed though, SSDs are like a thousand times slower than RAM. Swapoff and allocate a ton of memory to see it in action.
Nvme PCIe 4 SSDs are quite fast now tho, you can get between DDR1 and DDR2 speeds from a modern SSDs. This is why Apple are using their SSDs as swap quite aggressively. I'm using a MacBook Pro with 16 GBs of RAM and my swap usage regularly goes past 20 GBs and I didn't experience any slowdown during work.
Depends if the allocated memory is actively used or not. Some apps do not require a large amount of random access memory, and are totally fine with a small part of random access memory and a large part of not so random access and not so often used memory.
Alternatively I can imagine that MacOS simply has a damn good algorithm to determine what can be moved to swap and what cannot be moved to swap. They may also be using the SSD in SLC mode so that could contribute to the speedup as well.
It never kicks in for me when it should, but I figured out I can force trigger it manually with the magic SysRq key (Alt+SysRq+F, needs to be enabled first), which instantly recovers my system when it starts freezing from memory pressure.
Do note that this opens up a security hole. Since this can kill any app at random and is not interceptable, if you leave your PC in a public place, someone could come up and press this combo a few times. Chances are, it'll kill whatever the locking app you're using.
Yeah, default Ubuntu LTS webserver kicked the mysqld on a stupid query (but it worked on dev - all developers, someday) not too long ago...
Oh yes. I've had massive compiles (well linking) which failed because of the OOM killer, and I did exactly the same, massive swap so it will just keep going. So what if it's using disk as RAM and unusable for a few hours in the middle of the night, at least it finishes!
it does for me, usually by killing my session and throwing me back to the login screen