Re: tmpfs and the OOM killer

[Pedro <linux_user@izecksohn.com>]

On Wednesday 11 April 2007 16:48, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 02:23:31AM -0300, Pedro wrote:
> >   After suffering some days from a not|mis configured tmpfs,
> >
> >   As the OOM killer is not Posix,
> >
> >   Better than to kill processes would be to resize tmpfs, to use tmpfs
> > empty space.
>
> Will not work, because tmpfs does not use any memory for unused space. If
> you don't believe me, simply create a large file on your tmpfs, then check
> free memory, then remove the file and check free memory again.
>
> So your problem is not caused by the empty space on tmpfs, but either by
> too much space used on tmpfs or by your application using too much memory.
>
...
>
> If you cannot control your application's memory usage, you'll have to
> finely tune the overcommit_ratio.
>
> Regards,
> Willy

  You are right.

  But now I have two questions:

  1) Why is tmpfs total space fixed if at the check moment does not exist 
sufficient memory?

  2) How should an application be written to not be killed by OOM?
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