Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> When people talk about disabling the OOM killer, it doesn't stop the
> SIGKILL behaviour,
Yes it does, because the situation will never arise.
> it just causes the kernel to return -ENOMEM for
> malloc() much much earlier... (ie when you still actually have memory
> available).
Given the current price of disk, there is no sane reason not to have
enough swap space configured to make this not-a-problem. The OOM kill
mechanism was a reasonable solution for running systems that were not
expected to be too reliable anyway on small hardware, but if you're
trying to run a 24/7 server you're simply incompetent if you don't
disable it.
regards, tom lane