Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

17
  • 1
    I think this is what you should expect, if you're thrashing, but you're not really approaching 100% "used" i.e. there is too much memory usage which is file-backed, counted as "buff/cache". (Ugh, this phrasing assumes your tmpfs allocations are trivial, as these show up as "buff/cache", but cannot be paged out to a physical filesystem). min_free_kbytes is not relevant, it's not a reserve for cached pages. AFAICT none of the vm sysctls allow reserving any memory specifically for cached pages, i.e. limiting MAP_ANONYMOUS allocations :(.
    – sourcejedi
    Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 19:41
  • 5
    I've been looking for a solution for this exact issue for years now without any success. I believe I first noticed the problem after replacing my HDD by an SSD, which also entailed me disabling swapping altogether, but I can't really guarantee that it never happened before these changes, so it might be unrelated. I'm on Archlinux btw. Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 11:59
  • 2
    I have just posted on Arch Linux forums about this. Commented Jan 23, 2018 at 22:37
  • 1
    @dsstorefile1 Thank you, I will try that. But how could it trigger the OOM killer for sure when the kernel in this situation can not do it properly ?
    – M89
    Commented Jan 11, 2019 at 17:52
  • 1
    It helped when chrome managed to leak through all my RAM... (Although I eventually added an actual disk swap partition as well and eventually upgraded to a decent amount of RAM) Commented Jan 16, 2019 at 16:56