Stability and Memory Pressure in 8.2

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 7:02 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>>  * We need to find out why the oom-killer is not killing things fast
>>    enough. Based on our results, we might consider configuring
>>    /proc/$pid/oom_adj to preferentially kill some processes (e.g., the
>>    foreground [or background?] activities.)
>
> Any reason why killing first activities' processes wouldn't solve the
> stability issue? AFAIK, we haven't seen OOM conditions without any
> activity open.

Yes, we have.  In particular, if you update your system and then leave
it for a while, and later click the software update control panel, you
end up OOMing in the control panel.  Sugar restarts and reports are
that software update "works fine the second time".  So this might well
be a sugar leak; killing 'sugar' is not good for stability.
 --scott

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