Comment by frollogaston
18 hours ago
Just last night I was debugging some batch job on a Linux box making the machine go unresponsive even though there's no swap. User process taking all the RAM and the OOM killer doesn't stop it, instead the killer itself gets live-locked along with the ssh session or whatever else, so I can't just get in to look at it.
> even though there's no swap
When your OOM killer isn't aggressive enough, not having swap makes you go fully unresponsive sooner. You still get into a situation where the OS keeps having to purge pages and read them again from disk. But without swap one hand is tied behind its back and it can only purge code pages, not data pages.
Yeah, I figured in the end that's what was happening