Ubuntu Developers Have An Idea For Handling The Over-Eager Systemd OOMD App Killing

[sarmad]

Because you cannot always assume there is a user in front of the screen watching?
Because the user could provoke an oom situation to kill some deamon which prevents access to a certain file or maybe a virus scanner deamon.

Then only show a dialog with user space processes, or processes that are safe to kill.
If no user is in front of the screen, then simply show the dialog and wait until the user is in front of the screen, in the mean time the processes needing the extra memory can just hang and wait. If it's a server, then again just hang the processes that are wanting the extra memory until an admin ssh into the server and select what to kill; it's not like the server will be of any use after you kill some random process. If you have a server and you know you have memory leaking processes that are safe to restart then you can configure oom killer for your server and tell it exactly what to kill and restart.

In short, let the user decide what to kill, either decide on the spot or decide upfront before it happens. Don't act like you know better than the user.

[nabero]

What's the issue with saying no to the one requesting more memory when it's not available anymore and let the user chose the one that should be killed ? And maybe keep a small amount of free ram to run some privileged soft to kill the process ?

[reba]

If the browser is the process which uses the most RAM on your machine - you probably need an ad blocker (or even a request blocker if you want more).

With 5 open browser windows, each around 20 opened and loaded tabs it's just the fourth largest memory consumer (the largest being IntelliJ BY FAR, heck, even MS Teams needs as much memory as the browser).

[Raka555]

I'm not completely familiar with how the killer works but it might be a good idea to add another kill switch: SIGOOM which memory hungry apps like the browser should honor by killing of tabs or things like that prior to killing complete processes.

Or the browser can at least prompt the user to close tabs

[Damian]

I was getting random applications disappearing before I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04. It got worse with the upgrade.

I added the max amount of memory my laptop will support 32Gb. I still get random applications disappearing even though I doubled the swap space as well.

I installed Arch Linux on a development box and followed the guide for swap space. I wish I had not and just followed the old metric from 20yrs ago. I have the same problem I have with Ubuntu random applications disappearing. However I can't increase the amount of RAM on this machine, I have however added a large swapfile which has helped.

I would have liked some warning as it took ages to figure out what was happening.

The biggest memory use is the browser.

[ehofman]

I'm not completely familiar with how the killer works but it might be a good idea to add another kill switch: SIGOOM which memory hungry apps like the browser should honor by killing of tabs or things like that prior to killing complete processes.

[oleid]

Why do engineers always assume that the end user is very stupid and can't make any rational decision? Just show a dialog to the user and let him choose what to kill.

Because you cannot always assume there is a user in front of the screen watching?
Because the user could provoke an oom situation to kill some deamon which prevents access to a certain file or maybe a virus scanner deamon.

[sarmad]

Why do engineers always assume that the end user is very stupid and can't make any rational decision? Just show a dialog to the user and let him choose what to kill.

[ehofman]

Pfff, n00bs. Just get a faster internet connection and download more RAM.

You just invented the swapfile in the cloud.

[timrichardson]

Well, my development machine from 2016 has 32 GiB and occasionally hits the limit because CLion likes eating RAM for breakfast and if you open multiple projects with large codebases oomd hits eventually.

And this is a good thing. Otherwise the system would end up in a crawl and the machine would become unusable for minutes without reboot. That's why I configured the daemon in the first place.

a couple of years ago, I killed my 64GB machine by printing a 700 page PDF. So since then I have had real swap and userspace killers, initially earlyoomd. You can always run out of ram. This is the problem with the macos approach, it is a hack. Maybe a pragmatic hack, but you could never use it on a server.