Comment by kalleboo

3 years ago

I guess I've just been unlucky because the OOM killer has always made bizarre decisions on my machines and killed something more critical than the runaway process (or just not worked at all, not sure what the deal was is that, I never get logs). Every time I looked it up online the replies were just "you need to enough RAM to run your process, idiot, you should never need swap, swap is bad"

If the normal case is that the OOM killer just kills the out-of-control process, then I forfeit my argument.

Yes that’s how it’s supposed to work. Supposed to, because as you’ve noticed there’s a long list of oom related patches in the kernel because it’s doesn’t always kill what it should kill !

Theory and practice unfortunately…