Small allocations and OOM killer
Small allocations and OOM killer
Posted Dec 23, 2014 22:44 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)Parent article: The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule
If a few kilobytes of memory are requested, but unavailable, is it even worth trying to run the OOM killer? Since the victim process will most likely require some memory allocations in order to exit, as happened here.
I can understand running the OOM killer to free a few hundred megs, but if the system is so short of memory that even a 20kbyte request wasn't satisfied, breaking out the OOM machinery sounds like it will make things worse instead of better.