Re: Out of memory, but no OOM Killer? (2.6.9-ac11)

[Nick Piggin]

Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
> rsync seems to want lots of memory, yet the OOM killer doesn't strike.
> Subsequently, that machine died an ugly death until delivered by a
> power-cycle.
>
> Why doesn't the OOM killer reap rsync?

This could be the problem where fragmented memory causes atomic higher
order allocations to fail, for which there is a fix in -mm, which should
make its way into 2.6.11.

Also, the increased atomic memory reserves in current 2.6-bk should
alleviate the problem.

As a temporary workaround, you can increase /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes

BTW. what does `free` say when the allocation failures are happening?
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