OOM Killer killing whole system

From: Anton Titov
Date: Sun Jan 15 2006 - 10:08:06 EST


Yesterday I accidently noticed few OOM killer messages in the system log
and leaved a console tailing the log for the night. In 6 in the morning
OOM killer got mad generating 500 lines in the log and 5 minutes later
system closed the ssh connection and became inresponsive. The guy in the
datacenter told me that when he attached keyboard even caps lock was not
working. Inspite of this the system still was responsive (only to) ping.

The strange thing is this machine is relatively light loaded - now after
6 hours being up free shows:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2075468 1148564 926904 0 123472 314516
-/+ buffers/cache: 710576 1364892
Swap: 1004020 0 1004020

Load average stays under 0.5 most of the time. In 6 in the morning it
should be almost no load (there is no crons scheduled at that time).

I'm attaching messages from the log and my .config.

Anton Titov

Attachment: log.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

Attachment: config.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data