On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Mark Post <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> On 1/25/2010 at 12:53 PM, Robert Giordano <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> >> Can anyone provide any documentation or opinion on the use and management >> of the OOM-Killer process on SUSE Linux SLES 10 SP1? > > Not really. It's algorithms are hard-coded into the kernel. I'm not aware > of any way to influence it, other than adding virtual storage to the system, > either via paging space, or memory. I will provide an opinion on running > SLES10 SP1. Don't. It's been out of service quite a while now.
I don't think there's a good reason for driving your Linux server at the edge. Folks with discrete servers get enough real memory that they don't need to swap. So whatever interesting rules of thumb they have for sizing that (unused) swap space does not really matter. When you squeeze the penguins so that they do swap, you must look at sizing. As long as you don't use the VDISK, there's hardly a cost for having it. When your server starts to use it, you investigate what changed and make your adjustments in a planned outage. The most common case for Linux running out of memory that I see with customers are configuration mistakes that made the server start without swap disk and failure to set up the performance monitor to detect that and issue alerts... When the application is allocating huge amounts of memory, there's little help possible. It will probably run out of swap space whether you define 1G or 2G. If you have services running that you don't mind to get kicked of for some reason, then maybe you should not run them in the first place ;-) When your infrastructure relies on some basic provisioning processes to even recover the server, then you'd probably want to have those killed last. But when running on z/VM you could have more robust methods to reboot the server. Rob -- Rob van der Heij Velocity Software http://www.velocitysoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
