[ymbeld]

I don’t know what true OOM means, but my desktop has crashed I think at least three times in the last four months and the console said “OOM killer”. About 15GB of usable RAM, 2GB swap drive. I just have to have the usual applications open plus another browser in addition to Firefox, namely Chrome. (But naturally I don’t try to actively reproduce the behavior since I usually have better things to do than wait 10 minutes from everything becoming unresponsive -- even switching from the graphical session to a console -- to the OOM killer finally deciding to kill Chrome.) And I don’t run any virtual machines, just a big, fat IDE and stuff like that.

[ben_bai]

Your problem is the 2GB of swap. Get rid of it and it will just crash without 10min of slowdown (while swap disk is getting written to). </sarcasm>

Linux overcommitting memory and especially chrome/firefox beeing big-fat-memory-hogs are the problem. In fact every application which doesn't cope malloc beeing out of memory or assuming everybody has multiple gigs of memory to spare should "reevaluate".

[ymbeld]

Seriously though that’s a good idea. Might be better to just disable swap. :) Well, at least until I go out and buy more RAM.

[ben_bai]

The soft way would be to set ulimit for memory to something other than unlimited. To cap the max mem limit per process

[ymbeld]

Thanks, that’s a good suggestion.