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Message-ID: <3afbacad0601130843k6cf548e5y638b9ae3434096fa@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 17:43:40 +0100
From: Jim MacBaine <jmacbaine@gmail.com>
To: Ram Gupta <ram.gupta5@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: /proc/sys/vm/swappiness == 0 makes OOM killer go beserk
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On 1/13/06, Ram Gupta <ram.gupta5@gmail.com> wrote:

> This is ok. When the swappiness variable  is set to zero kernel does
> not try to swap out processes. So once all memory is used up by
> processes it can not free up memory by swapping and hence had to kill
> process.

It _would_ be ok if swappiness == 0 would mean that the kernel will
not swap at all. That's not the case. Even without an excessive use of
tmpfs the kernel found ~250 MB of unused memory which it swapped out
during the last days with swappiness == 0.

Regards,
Jim
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