Making sense of OOM killer messages?

[Steffen Kluge]

On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 21:09 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> I'm not sure it's useful to know that:-( In my experience (which 
> includes 2.6 kernels that are supposed to do this better) the killed 
> process is generally an innocent bystander.

The process that triggered the OOM condition is probably just as
innocent. There isn't always a "cuplrit", and if there is it isn't easy
to spot. The OOM killer tries to do the most sensible thing by killing
less active processes that still yield a fair amount of released memory.

BTW, the OpenBSD folks reckon there is no reasonable or fair way of
dealing with an OOM situation and take the easy way out: they simply
halt the whole system...

Cheers
Steffen.

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