Re: PG Killed by OOM Condition

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 11:03:06PM +1000, John Hansen wrote:
>
>>Might it be worth while protecting the postmaster from an OOM Kill on
>>Linux by setting /proc/{pid}/oom_adj to -17 ?
>>(Described vaguely in mm/oom_kill.c)
>
>
> Has it actually happened to you? PostgreSQL is pretty good about its
> memory usage. Besides, seems to me it should be an system admisitrator
> descision.
>

It's happened to me...

Usually it's when there's some other runaway process, and the kernel
decides to kill PostgreSQL because it can't tell the difference.

I really don't like that "feature" in linux. Nobody has been able to
explain to me why linux is the only OS with an OOM Killer. If someone
here has more information, I'd like to know.

When using linux I always set vm_overcommit=2.

Regards,
Jeff Davis