Re: [PATCH] a simple OOM killer to save me from Netscape

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 01:20:07PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:

> What we'd like to see is have the OOM killer act before the
> system thrashes ... if only because this thrashing could mean
> we never actually reach OOM because everything grinds to a
> halt.

It's almost impossible to tell in advance whether the system is going
to stabilise on its own when you start getting into a swap storm.
Going into OOM killer preemptively is going to risk killing tasks
unnecessarily.  I'd much rather leave the killer as a last-chance
thing to save us from eternal thrashing, rather than have it try too
hard to prevent any thrashing in the first place. 

If the workload suddenly changes, for example switching virtual
desktops on a low memory machine so that suddenly a lot of active
tasks need swapped out and a great deal of new data becomes
accessible, you get something that is still a swap storm but which
will reach equilibrium itself in time, for example.

--Stephen
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