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Date:   Thu, 9 Jan 2020 22:28:10 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
To:     Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc:     kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        akpm@linux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: OOM killer not nearly agressive enough?
Message-ID: <20200109212810.GB23620@dhcp22.suse.cz>
References: <20200107204412.GA29562@amd>
 <20200109115633.GR4951@dhcp22.suse.cz>
 <20200109210535.GB1553@duo.ucw.cz>
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On Thu 09-01-20 22:05:36, Pavel Machek wrote:
> On Thu 2020-01-09 12:56:33, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Tue 07-01-20 21:44:12, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > > 
> > > I updated my userspace to x86-64, and now chromium likes to eat all
> > > the memory and bring the system to standstill.
> > > 
> > > Unfortunately, OOM killer does not react:
> > > 
> > > I'm now running "ps aux", and it prints one line every 20 seconds or
> > > more. Do we agree that is "unusable" system? I attempted to do kill
> > > from other session.
> > 
> > Does sysrq+f help?
> > 
> > > Do we agree that OOM killer should have reacted way sooner?
> > 
> > This is impossible to answer without knowing what was going on at the
> > time. Was the system threshing over page cache/swap? In other words, is
> > the system completely out of memory or refaulting the working set all
> > the time because it doesn't fit into memory?
> 
> What statistics are best to collect? Would the memory lines from top
> do the trick? I normally have gkrellm running, but I found its results
> hard to interpret.

/proc/vmstat (and collecting it periodically) gives the most
comprehensive picture about the state of MM. Interpreting numbers is far
from trivial though. It requires to analyze multiple snapshots usually
to see how the situation evolves.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs