Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:42:32 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com>
Cc: aebr@win.tue.nl, cmm@us.ibm.com, andrea@suse.de,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: OOM problems on 2.6.12-rc1 with many fsx tests
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"Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com> wrote:
>
> >> Nothing beats poking around in a dead machine's guts with kgdb though.
> > 
> > Everyone his taste.
> > 
> > But I was surprised by
> > 
> >> SwapTotal:     1052216 kB
> >> SwapFree:      1045984 kB
> > 
> > Strange that processes are killed while lots of swap is available.
> 
> I don't think we're that smart about it. If we're really low on mem, it
> seems we invoke the OOM killer whether processes are causing the problem
> or not. 
> 
> OTOH, if we can't free the kernel mem, we don't have much choice, but 
> it's not really helping much ;-)
> 

I'm suspecting here that we simply leaked a refcount on every darn
pagecache page in the machine.  Note how mapped memory has shrunk down to
less than a megabyte and everything which can be swapped out has been
swapped out.

If so, then oom-killing everything in the world is pretty inevitable.
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