Re: Let's talk about the elephant in the room - the Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure

[Johannes Weiner]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 04:51:42PM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> Per default, the OOM killer will engage after 15 seconds of at least
> 80% memory pressure. These values are tunable via sysctls
> vm.thrashing_oom_period and vm.thrashing_oom_level.

Let's go with this:

Per default, the OOM killer will engage after 15 seconds of at least
80% memory pressure. From experience, at 80% the user is experiencing
multi-second reaction times. 15 seconds is chosen to be long enough to
not OOM kill a short-lived spike that might resolve itself, yet short
enough for users to not press the reset button just yet.