Re: OOM policy, overcommit control, and soft limits

From: Alan Jenkins
Date: Sat May 31 2008 - 12:49:55 EST


Alan Cox wrote:
In other words, I reckon I have on the order of a gigabyte of virtual
address space, which has been malloc'ed or equivalent, but is not used
and therefore requires no memory resource (ram or swap).

No need to reckon. The committed_as in the proc file should give a rough
value.

Alan
Thanks for the education. I shall read up on the other numbers in /proc/meminfo as well.

In that case I was overly pessimistic. I was only committed around the 512M mark. It jumps up to 750M if I open Amarok and Firefox though. At times I've run more - I would guess I can contrive combinations which go above 1000M.


I've not had an OOM event on this machine. I have had runaway development-related loads, causing thrashing (hitting swap) out of control, but I can't really comment. I don't remember what caused it exactly. Plus I'm swapping to a Flash drive; a Flash specific IO scheduler might have coped better (than noop) and made it easier to recover.

Alan
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/