Re: Setting oom_adj on linux?

* Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> Alex Hunsaker <badalex(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > Sure this was openssh? I just looked through the entire cvs history
> > for opensshp and found 0 references to 'oom' let alone 'oom_adj'.
> > Maybe something distro specific?
>
> FWIW, I see no evidence that sshd on Fedora does anything to change its
> oom score --- the oom_adj file reads as zero for both the parent daemon
> and its children. Kinda scary to realize the OOM killer could easily
> lock me out of boxes I run headless.

There were a few issues, as it turns out, the particularly annoying one
was in the init script which caused upgrades to fail due to sshd not
being restarted, bug report here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=473573

The other issue was with a Debian-specific patch which was applied to
OpenSSH which basically just created noise in the log file, bug report
here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=487325

In the end, the problem was with errors being returned from attempts to
modify oom_adj. As long as we can just ignore those hopefully there
won't be any issues.

Thanks,

Stephen