[mythtv-users] swappiness

[Eric Sharkey]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Ian Clark <mrrooster at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  I thought that the result of that
>> wpould be a complete lockup of everything, including any dirty pages and the
>> only way out would be a hard reset, with risk of disk trashing.
>>
> I believe on most distros the OOM killer will fire up it's shotgun and
> start randomly* terminating things. (Which I'll be honest always seems
> a little crazy to me, but it can be disabled).

No, it's a lot more sophisticated than that.  There's a number of
heuristics used to score all the processes and the kernel kills the
process with the highest score.

If you have a process with a run-away memory leak, the OOM killer
almost always targets that process.

I write Linux software for a living and have had ample opportunity to
observe the OOM killer in action during development and testing.

> Assuming you're using a fs with journaling you should be fairly safe
> from FS corruption.

You don't even need journaling for that.  The kernel maintains the FS
and it won't kill itself.  Journaling only helps for kernel panics or
power losses.

Eric