Re: killed: out of swap

[mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst)]

bqt%softjar.se@localhost (Johnny Billquist) writes:

>> They might be the reason for the memory shortage. You can prefer large
>> processes as victims or protect system services to keep the system
>> managable.

>So when one process tries to grow, you'd kill a process that currently 
>have no issues in running?


All processes have issues on that system and the goal is to keep things
alive so that you can recover, a system hang, crash or reboot is the
worst outcome.

Obviously there is no heuristic that can predict what action will have
the best outcome and which causes the least damage. Guessing on the
cost of various kinds of damage is an impossible task by itself as
that is fairly subjective.

But there can be a heuristic that helps in many cases, and for the rest
you can hint the system.