Re: spurious out of swap kills

From: Don Lewis <truckman_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2019 18:23:09 -0700 (PDT)
On 13 Sep, Mark Millard wrote:
> Don Lewis truckman at FreeBSD.org wrote on
> Thu Sep 12 23:00:19 UTC 2019 :
> 
> . . .
>> Nevertheless, I see these errors,
>> with rustc being the usual victim:
>> 
>> Sep 11 23:21:43 zipper kernel: pid 16581 (rustc), jid 43, uid 65534, was killed: out of swap space
>> Sep 12 02:48:23 zipper kernel: pid 1209 (rustc), jid 62, uid 65534, was killed: out of swap space
> . . .
> 
> Unfortunately, the wording of this type of message is a misnomer for
> what drives the kills: it is actually driven by being unable to gain
> more free memory but FreeBSD will not swap-out processes that stay
> runnable (or are running), only ones that are waiting. Even a single
> process that stays runnable and keeps lots of RAM in the active
> category can lead to kills when swap is unused or little used. So the
> kill-behavior is very workload dependent.
> 
> Real "out of swap" conditions tend to also have messages
> similar to:
> 
> Aug  5 17:54:01 sentinel kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(32): failed
> 
> If you are not seeing such messages, then it is likely that
> the mount of swap space still free is not the actual thing
> driving the kills.
> 
> Are you seeing "swap_pager_getswapspace(32): failed" messages?
> 
> (It used to be that the system simply leaves the dirty pages in
> memory when a swap_pager_getswapspace failed message is produced.
> Of itself, it did not cause a kill. I do not know about now.)

I'm only getting the "out of swap" error.  Yes, it is misleading because
there are still tens of GB of free swap.
Received on Sat Sep 14 2019 - 23:23:11 UTC

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