Transcript
Meme format: Undertaker standing behind AJ Styles
AJ styles caption: Stubborn process consuming too much memory.
Undertaker caption: OOM Killer
I would rather change the meme to:
“Yeah, with modern RAM settings, you don’t need Swap.”
OOM killer lurking behind.
Except that most likely, it kills something completely unrelated instead.
It is now my head canon that it randomly chooses a memory location and kills whatever process owns it, repeating as necessary.
The perverse logic of there being a greater chance of hitting a memory hog makes far too much sense.
It can’t actually be this though, can it?
I believe, and I could be very wrong, that it kills the largest memory process. The problem is that it may not be the problematic process. You could have a well behaved DB that is using a stable 80%, and a runaway process that rapidly fills the remaining 20%, and OOM will kill the DB, and let the out of control process keep consuming memory until it becomes the largest. Then your DB is down and you don’t known why.
I like the idea of just killing processes at random though. Determinism is overrated.
Go full Russian roulette and include the OOM killer itself in the list of targetable processes.
Eeny, meeny, miny- YOU
