Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Integrating systemd-oomd For Improving Low Memory Handling

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Integrating systemd-oomd For Improving Low Memory Handling

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is going to be making use of systemd-oomd for aiming to improve the experience when out of memory or under heavy memory pressure on the Linux distribution...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-22.04-Systemd-OOMD

[abu_shawarib]

I had freezes (no ctl+alt+F#) from running out of memory even on 21.10 and 20.04. Kinda unacceptable that it happens for a modern OS.

[mystiquewolf]

I'm using Firefox with "Auto Tab Discard" extension and have set swappiness to 1. This seems to have stopped the freezes. Also disabled btrfs QGroups - this made a lot of difference.

[kylew77]

Pity this won't get backported to CentOS 7 for work. Hate it when OOM goes on a rampage and the server has to be restarted.

[krzyzowiec]

I solved my problem by acquiring 64GB of RAM for my desktop. The XanMod kernel also seems to save a lot of memory for me over the standard kernel somehow.

[RahulSundaram]

Pity this won't get backported to CentOS 7 for work. Hate it when OOM goes on a rampage and the server has to be restarted.

systemd-oomd relies on Pressure Stall Information (PSI) and EL7 kernel doesn't have it. You could patch the kernel and run a backported version of systemd if you really want it but that's an intrusive amount of change.

[tildearrow]

Nice, but why not le9 with prelockd? Been using it since last month and never had the system hang during memory pressure ever again.

[Draget]

I have not tried systemd-oomd. But it always bothered me that despite testing different io-schedulers, swap configurations etc. I had major issues in OOM situations on super powerful servers, small servers, desktops, laptops, hdds and ssds for many years. One of the things I never understood, why Linux seems to handle memory-pressure situations so poorly.

I expect it to be super slow with swap and nuke some processes if there is no other way, but not become unresponsive for minutes or completely lock up, crash etc. Looking forward to test it.

[mystiquewolf]

I have not tried systemd-oomd. But it always bothered me that despite testing different io-schedulers, swap configurations etc. I had major issues in OOM situations on super powerful servers, small servers, desktops, laptops, hdds and ssds for many years. One of the things I never understood, why Linux seems to handle memory-pressure situations so poorly.

I expect it to be super slow with swap and nuke some processes if there is no other way, but not become unresponsive for minutes or completely lock up, crash etc. Looking forward to test it.

I think it's swapping early constantly. I lowered swappinness to 1 and now used swap is considerably lower. It swaps less frequently.

[Vorpal]

The article reads "50% memory pressure limit for user sessions". Is memory pressure the same as memory usage? If so that seems low. Why not allow the user to use something like 90% ram?

I often run memory intensive computational tasks, though I tune them to leave a couple of GB (out of my 32 GB) to the system, X etc.