4 ms·

I guess OOM is more problematic on low-memory systems or when you have more than a nominal amount of swap. If you have enough memory that the desktop environme

I guess OOM is more problematic on low-memory systems or when you have more than a nominal amount of swap. If you have enough memory that the desktop environment, browsers, and other processes that should keep running only use a small fraction of it, the OOM killer can pick a reasonable target reliably. A process that tries to allocate too much memory gets killed, and everything is robust and deterministic. I sometimes trigger OOM several times in an hour, for example when trying to find reasonable computational parameters for something.

Sakos 3y ago
How much memory do you think is reasonable? I've had it happen to me with 16GB and even 32GB, where I never ever have this issue on Windows (unless for some reason I'm on a 2GB RAM system for God knows why). I wish people would stop defending pathological behavior that's broken for standard desktop use. What's wrong with wanting things to improve?
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Nobody was defending anything. I just told that I don't remember having any issues with the Linux OOM killer, and guessed a potential reason. I haven't really used any Windows version later than 2000 for anything except gaming, so I don't know how things work there these days. I mostly use macOS and Linux, and I've had far more trouble with pathological memory management behavior in macOS. Basically, macOS lets individual processes allocate and use far more memory than is physically available. When I'm running something with unpredictable memory requirements, I have to babysit the computer and kill the process manually if necessary, or the system may become slow and poorly responsive.
mnw21cam 3y ago
On the contrary, it's worse on systems with lots of memory, because those are the systems that are trying to do more. About 8 years ago I got a work machine with 384GB of RAM, and I installed early_oom on it to make the OOM killer work a whole load earlier, otherwise the system would just become completely unresponsive for hours if one of my students/colleagues accidentally ran something that would make it run out of RAM.
- temac 3y ago
  Linux provably got better because i've got a 200GB multi user machine where oom kills (on a stock debian 12) are largely uneventful.

Sakos 3y ago

How much memory do you think is reasonable? I've had it happen to me with 16GB and even 32GB, where I never ever have this issue on Windows (unless for some reason I'm on a 2GB RAM system for God knows why). I wish people would stop defending pathological behavior that's broken for standard desktop use. What's wrong with wanting things to improve?

jltsiren 3y ago
Nobody was defending anything. I just told that I don't remember having any issues with the Linux OOM killer, and guessed a potential reason. I haven't really used any Windows version later than 2000 for anything except gaming, so I don't know how things work there these days. I mostly use macOS and Linux, and I've had far more trouble with pathological memory management behavior in macOS. Basically, macOS lets individual processes allocate and use far more memory than is physically available. When I'm running something with unpredictable memory requirements, I have to babysit the computer and kill the process manually if necessary, or the system may become slow and poorly responsive.

mnw21cam 3y ago

On the contrary, it's worse on systems with lots of memory, because those are the systems that are trying to do more. About 8 years ago I got a work machine with 384GB of RAM, and I installed early_oom on it to make the OOM killer work a whole load earlier, otherwise the system would just become completely unresponsive for hours if one of my students/colleagues accidentally ran something that would make it run out of RAM.

temac 3y ago
Linux provably got better because i've got a 200GB multi user machine where oom kills (on a stock debian 12) are largely uneventful.