Re: configurability of OOM killer

On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 16:48 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Ron Mayer <rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> writes:
> > That shared memory of the children should not be added to the size
> > of the parent process multiple times regardless of if something's
> > an essential process or not. Since those bytes are shared, it
> > seems such bytes should only be added to the badness once, no?
>
> Certainly that would help, and it might be an easier sell to the kernel
> hackers: instead of arguing "this policy is foolish", we only have to
> say "your VM accounting is wildly inaccurate". We'd still end up with a
> postmaster at more risk than we'd like, but at least not at dozens of
> times more risk than any backend.
>

I agree completely, and that's exactly the argument I tried to make on
LKML a year ago:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2007/2/12/54202

Regards,
Jeff Davis