Memory Management

[Murphy]

I'm sorry that the links I posted were not enough to help along the way. For anything more, I'd have to spend a lot of time actually trying to reproduce your issue, and then further troubleshooting, and tech support isn't something I do outside of work.

I already explained why it wasn't, i even thanked you for posting it...

(After realising asking for advise here was a waste of time i did a lot more research and had already come across nohang but it's little more than a more effective OOM killer, ungracefully killing programs should never be acceptable, but thanks for the link, i guess).

Despite the rest of that post blaming the user for not correctly provisioning all the way down, and saying anyone over-provisiong servers, especially in production, is a total hack. It means you are not catering for the adverse effects, and just 'hoping' it goes okay.

First search on DDG for "how to check if hugepages are used in linux": https://access.redhat.com/solutions/320303

Yea and it's the same result i got after spending a week investigating things for myself after realising that one of the people who replied simply refused to accept that it wasn't to do with VMs, another refused to accept that it was a problem whatsoever and another claims that they...

use a mixture of Windows, Linux and MacOS in normal desktop use and with the type of work I do I can't say that I've had my OS run out of resource and lock up in a very long time; but I'm also not running resource starved systems. Conversely in the server space I've managed many resource starved Windows servers and once they run out of physical memory and fill up their page file because of a bad app, guess what - they become completely unresponsive. Running out of memory is always going to lead to a bad time, whatever you're using.

Haven't had their OS run out of resource and lock up in a very long time so probably doesn't have the experience to know what to suggest.

On that note, I'm not trying to be facetious or say you aren't having problems, but since I've been using Linux from day one (when it was first announced on usenet), through today both at work and at home, I've never hit such issues.
Yes, I see OOM, but it's because applications or systems are incorrectly provisioned. No, I never over-provision VMs. This does not mean you (or others) do not have a problem, but it's one I have never experienced and the link I posted to the github repo is where I personally would start if I had to fix something. Is that suitable for 'average' users ? I have no idea, but there's a reason my wife and daughter use Macs.

I've already told you how to replicate it, open a console > type 'echo {1..1000000000}' and wait for it to be ungracefully killed.

Like i said before simply closing applications is far from ideal, heck it's only just about a step up from crashing the kernel. There are better ways, as I've learnt over the last couple of weeks, to deal with OOM situations.

You obviously - like many - have issues with 'the community', but that's like having issues with 'anonymous' or 'society'. Perhaps ask the maintainers of the VM software, or the distro you use, or the kernel maintainers, as they are the people who know this 'inside out'. The 'community' is just random people, most of whom (especially arch users) who have learned for themselves through trial and error, with some assistance online, but then trying and failing a lot, and that's likely why you get the responses that you do. Again, I'm sorry if this isn't what you're looking for, but it's how things are.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck trying to solve your problem - most of us have been through many similar in our journey - and hope you find a solution you are happy with.

I'm out.

Yea i wonder why so many people have issues with 'the community'.

 

[andshrew]

Well it seems like you know more than anyone else now, so good luck with your endeavours. If you find a solution to your issue perhaps you'll share it.

 

[Murphy]

Well it seems like you know more than anyone else now, so good luck with your endeavours. If you find a solution to your issue perhaps you'll share it.

Not anyone just the people who have so far posted in this thread who tried to gaslight the OP into thinking it wasn't a problem despite posting links that show it is, blamed the OP despite them admitting they've not had the issue themselves so are ill-equipped to offer advise, and claiming the OP only made the thread to rant after having attacked the OP on multiple occasions and then taken umbrage when they get the obvious reaction.

And yes i will, in fact i have, posted 'solutions' which is far more than anyone else has attempted so far, once I've tested...

how to increase the swapfile size and whether, other than using more storage space, there's any issue with over-sizing it (50-100GB).

Even just an acknowledgment that how Linux handles OOM situations is far from ideal but it is what it is so until something better comes along you may want to look into zram and/or zswap with a brief explanation of what they do, maybe followed by a short discussion to clarify or attempts to answer reasonable questions. Maybe, if it were me from the future were I've spent the last week and a half learning about how Linux deals with, and possible solutions/work-around, i would've suggesting looking into swapspaces if i didn't mind a temporary lack of system responsiveness while more swap is added or taken away.

I'll post about what i learn and my experience with them. Maybe if people had posted about what they know and their experiences in the first place rather than attacking the OP and/or trying to gaslight them into believing it's not a problem i could've started from there instead of wasting my time replying to people who clearly don't know what they're talking about because, by their own admission, they either think it's not a problem, that it's user error, that Linux isn't meant to be used by users, or that they've never experienced the problem so don't know what may or may not help.

e: I mean if all you're going to do is blame it on user error and deny it's an issue then i do question why you bothered posting anything in the first place, because the 'help'/'advise' has been mighty thin on the ground.