Re: Avoiding OOM on overcommit...?

From: Richard Gooch (rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca)
Date: Sat Mar 25 2000 - 01:27:51 EST

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    Andreas Dilger writes:
    > Olaf Weber writes:
    > > In a similar vein, if a process dies due to SIGXCPU or SIGXFSZ that
    > > you know it dies because it ran into a cpu or file limit. Yes, I
    > > would like to have some OS support from an overcommitting OS, so that
    > > if it decides to kill a process of mine because it ran out memory I
    > > get SIGXMEM instead of SIGBUS.
    >
    > If you look at the AIX documentation, they have a signal like this. The
    > following is quoted from the following URL, and I urge people posting to
    > this OOM thread to read this document to get a better understanding of
    > what a system with (optional) no-overcommit behaves like.
    >
    > http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixbman/admnconc/pag_space_under.htm
    >
    > "The system monitors the number of free paging space blocks and
    > detects when a paging-space shortage exists. When the number of free
    > paging-space blocks falls below a threshold known as the paging-space
    > warning level, the system informs all processes (except kprocs)
    > of this condition by sending the SIGDANGER signal. If the shortage
    > continues and falls below a second threshold known as the paging-space
    > kill level, the system sends the SIGKILL signal to processes that are
    > the major users of paging space and that do not have a signal handler
    > for the SIGDANGER signal (the default action for the SIGDANGER signal
    > is to ignore the signal). The system continues sending SIGKILL signals
    > until the number of free paging-space blocks is above the paging-space
    > kill level."
    >
    > Those advocates of "no OOM possible" implementations should read the part:
    >
    > "The AIXwindows server currently requires more than 250MB of paging space
    > when the application runs in early allocation mode."
    >
    > It is interesting to note that memory overcommit has recently been ADDED
    > to AIX, arguably one of the most popular MISSION CRITICAL BUSINESS Unixes.

    ??? I recall seeing SIGDANGER and SIGKILL on low memory back in 1991
    when we using some AIX machines. I wouldn't call that recent.

                                    Regards,

                                            Richard....
    Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
    Current: rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca

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