Re: oom-killer vs system not reachable

[Sam Watkins <swatkins@fastmail.fm>]

On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 10:37:22AM +0100, Robert Ian Smit wrote:
> Are those oom problems related to hardware, kernel or userland
> software?

userland software eating all the virtual memory

> The system is mainly used as a dropbox for a huge amount of mail.
> Mutt is opening and working on a 1.5 GB mbox. Considering this
> usage, should we apply special configuration or should a 'vanilla
> system' be able to cope with this?

wow!  that's a lot of mail

I don't think mutt actually loads the entire mailbox into memory at any stage,
though, so this shouldn't kill your computer.

I suggest you run "top" and watch it while you work for a while to find out
what is going wrong.

You can always try throwing more swap space at it, e.g. for another gigabyte of
swap (as root):

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1024 count=$[1024 * 1024]
  mkswap /swap
  swapon /swap

(and put a new line in /etc/fstab)

If this helps, you can use parted or whatever to resize your partitions and
increase your swap partition, a swap partition is a bit more efficient than a
swap file.