Comment by tcdent
17 hours ago
Wait, how does literally no one in this thread mention swap?
IME, many default installations in recent years don't configure swap by default. Dedicate a few tens-of-gigabytes on your hard drive and memory overflows there instead of borking.
Sometimes I use swap, but >half the time I'm intentionally disabling it so the system doesn't go into livelock. I'd rather have an OOM than an unresponsive system. Granted this is usually on some headless Linux machine running batch jobs, not my PC.
It only postpones the inevitable. It doean't actually fix it. I went for a 64 GB swapfile to hopefully not have to worry about it any more, only to find my swapfile full after a few days anyway, even when configuring swappiness to a minimum. Shit just piles up for no apparent reason. I'm sure someone smarter than me can diagnose the problem, but I just decided to reduce the swapfile size to a more sensible value and reboot every now and then. I should probably try Zram or whatever to see if that mitigates the problem.
Oh, that's just a garden variety memory leak.
Most applications these days are very good about that; you likely have just a single app that you use regularly that leaks. If you kill the process the memory will be recovered, save for some allocations the kernel maintains.
"top" or maybe "slabtop" will find the offending, very very broken, program that's leaking memory like crazy, making your system doomed no matter what you do or how much physical memory you install.
It's not inevitable for most use cases.