[Users] OOM Killer invoked even that are available RAM and swap on the machine

[Vasily Averin]

Dear Danny,

1) Are you sure that it was global memory shortage?

On Virtuozzo kernels there is per-container OOM-killer,
it is executed in case memory shortage inside affected container and it kills tasks related to this container only.
It is normal behaviour,and you should not worry about such cases.

Please read related kernel messages, it explain the reason of OOM.

2) if it was global OOM -- need to clarify in which memory zone it was happen.

as you probably know memory in linux kernels is divided into few memory zones.
Global OOM can happen when kernel was forced to get memory strongly from specified memory zone.
The memory zone can have no pages that can be moved to swap, and when memory management cannot free memory in this zone by other ways
it can call OOM-killer.
This can happen, but it is quite rare case. Need to find how who had submitted such memory request.

Frankly speaking I think you observe first of described scenarious.

Thank you,
    Vasily Averin

On 2017-09-29 02:17, Danny Gurman wrote:
>
>
> Hello all,
>
> I will really appreciate assistance regarding the following issue:
>
>  
>
> We have a product deployed on CentosOS 6.9 with OpenVZ.
>
> Machine RAM size – *32* GB + Swap file (16 GB).
>
> The following described issue was reproduced on the OpenVZ kernels:
>
> 2.6.32-042stab125.1 , 2.6.32-042stab123.9 , 2.6.32-042stab123.2, 2.6.32-042stab120.11
>
>  
>
> For debugging  purpose the single *container* on the host*was stopped*.
>
>  
>
> We observed that OOM Killer is invoked whenever host RAM usage without buffers reach ~13 GB:
>
> Free command output (few seconds before OOM killer invoked):
>
> total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>
> Mem:      32793080   23197272    9595808        920     135992   10276712
>
>     -/+ buffers/cache:   *12784568*   20008512
>
> Swap:     16465916          *0*   16465916
>
>  
>
> On the message buffer, we see that the machine memory state just before the OOM killer invocation is:
>
> RAM: *2097074* / 2097152 [1] SWAP: *1048576* / *1048576* [1] KMEM: 227942400 /
>
>  
>
> Again , machine has 32 GB, only 13 GB is used, no swap usage – so where those wrong values came
>
> from and why OOM killer is invoked in this stage?
>
>  
>
> The issue is reproducible with similar results every time.
>
>  
>
> Is it a known issue ?
>
> Should I open a defect for this?
>
> Also – is there a  way to totally disable the OOM killer?
>
>  
>
> I’ll be glad to provide any required detail (like sysctl –a output)
>
>  
>
> Regards,
>
> Danny
>
>  
>
> Radware
>
> 	
>
> Danny Gurman
> Dev Lead, APSolute Vision
> Email: danny.gurman at gmail.com <mailto:danny.gurman at gmail.com>
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