Re: "Out of Memory: Killed process" errors on server running Oracle

[Tom Sightler <ttsig tuxyturvy com>]

On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 07:27 -0600, Eric Sisler wrote:
> In my opinion, a lightly-loaded dual quad-core / 16Gb host with plenty
> of resources should *not* be experiencing this problem.  Our older
> VMware hosts running RHEL 3 are much more reliable, I'm considering
> rolling back to RHEL 3.  See my earlier post for details.

As I mentioned in a previous email, you really should look at the output
from the OOM killer and see why it thinks it's OOM.  If it's low zone
startvation (very likely if your running a 32-bit kernel with 16GB of
RAM) then the hugemem kernels may very well help.

Memory is not just one big pool, there are zones of memory (DMA,
Low-mem, High-mem) and there has to be memory free in every zone or the
OOM killer will take action.  This can me less of an issue on a 64-bit
kernel, but the DMA zone can still be a problem.

Later,
Tom