Damn you OOM Killer!!

[Cyker]

I'm running a recent beta of Opera and it has a memory leak issue; I'm sure it will be fixed eventually, but in the meantime it's triggering some very nasty behavior in the kernel, namely the dreaded OOM Killer! :O

When it's triggered, I'd expect it to take out Opera, but not only does it kill opera but apache, qtorrent, thunderbird, VirtualBox and several instances of kedit and rxvt!

Is there something I can do about this, e.g. to make it only kill Opera and not go on a mad killing spree with my other apps? :S

[frostschutz]

Yeah sure there's an easy solution. Don't run Opera. Or at least not a beta that leaks memory that badly.

An alternative may be adding more swap. If the leaked areas are large enough they can simply be paged out and never ever be paged in again, keeping your physical memory free of bloat.

Yet more obscure alternative is to have a script running in the background that checks Opera's memory usage frequently, and kills it directly before it grows big enough to trigger OOM. However this will only work if the leakage is somewhat continuous... if it just allocated too much memory instantly there is no easy way to react to it in a script.

Whether it's possible to set "preferred" applications for OOM, I don't know.

[Cyker]

That's the bizarre thing; The swapfile doesn't even get touched!

It just fills up RAM then kills a semi-random set of processes. TBH I'm not very happy about that behavior - Even once Opera is fixed, it'll still be there - So I want to find out what I could do..

I suspect there's some low-memory allocation problems going on which is why the swap isn't even being touched, but how to fix that and/or disable the oom-killer or make it only kill the process with the largest RAM allocation or lower priority processes or something would be better solutions for me...

[xibo]

GDB can set rlimits for programms it runs... Why not run opera in gdb ( don't know if that works )?

If opera is not swapped it's probably doing accesses to all of it's memory pages regularily, which would be weird, but could happen nevertheless

[frostschutz]

[eccerr0r]

Perhaps ulimiting opera's memory may help temporarily?

ulimit -m 262144 # use 256MB memory for this shell and subshells from now on.
ulimit -d 262144 # let data size get no more than 256MB

While this is not the proper solution it may help a little.

This is weird though, opera should not lock its pages... I can see virtualbox/vm's wanting to lock pages in RAM.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[zeek]

Try this:

[phajdan.jr]

You can also disable memory overcommit.
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http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/