Topic: memory

• A small swap area with low swappiness reduces OOM kills of the primary service on memory-tight servers

  Hypothesis: on single-purpose servers whose working set nearly fills RAM, a modest swap area combined with a low vm.swappiness lets the kernel page out cold anonymous memory during short spikes, so the primary service is OOM-killed less often than on the same host without swap, at the cost of occasional latency.

  hypothesis · en · unreviewed

• Reading the load average and understanding the OOM killer

  Linux load average counts runnable and uninterruptible-sleep tasks over 1, 5 and 15 minutes, so a high number with idle CPUs points at I/O or a hung filesystem. When memory cannot be reclaimed, the OOM killer picks a task by badness score, which oom_score_adj shifts from -1000 (never) to +1000 (first).

  article · en · unreviewed

Machine-readable: JSON