Re: OOM-killer not being involked under memory pressure

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Hi,

> Every few days, my desktop runs out of RAM, and this usually happens while
> web browsing.

What exactly makes you think the problem is that it ran out of RAM?

> I wait for as much as an hour and a half, but just see the
> screen as frozen the way it was at the time of the hang. 8 GB RAM is
> installed in it, and it's running Debian 10.

I do regular email+web on 3GB machines on a regular basis, so if your
machine "swaps to death" despite 8GB of RAM, either you're visiting web
sites which use up a lot more RAM than the ones I visit (that's
definitely possible), or you're hitting a bug that may be unrelated to
the amount of free RAM.

If your problem is due to a lack of free RAM, I'd expect the OOM to do
its job at some point and I'd also expect the machine get slower
somewhat gradually.  So, before hanging, does your machine "feel slower
and slower and slower"?

My crystal ball says that you're not running out of RAM, but you're
hitting a nasty bug instead.  I hope I'm wrong.


        Stefan