> And random OOM-killing is plain crazy. Just reboot and start anew.
Are you arguing that killing 100% of the running programs and losing all the data is superior to kill <100% of the programs?
> Because what are you going to OOM-kill, some non-important process? Why would you run non-important processes in the first place.
Because I misclicked my mouse. It's very common to create a disaster by mistakes, for example, accidentally open a 10 GiB file in a web browser or a text editor. In this case, the OOM algorithm will always kill Firefox without affecting others, and it's preciously what I need. Killing Firefox (due to a webpage with runaway JavaScript) while keeping my unsaved text editor running is desirable, even if it's not guaranteed, but statistically much better than killing the computer.
I often use Alt + Sysrq to manually activate the OOM killer, in case the kernel doesn't automatically detect memory exhaustion fast enough. And it works pretty nice for me. I found that, at the worst case scenario, nearly the entire desktop will be killed (rarely occurs, often it simply kills the offending process), but I can still restart my desktop in a minute, instead of spending five minutes to reboot the hardware.
Are you arguing that killing 100% of the running programs and losing all the data is superior to kill <100% of the programs?
> Because what are you going to OOM-kill, some non-important process? Why would you run non-important processes in the first place.
Because I misclicked my mouse. It's very common to create a disaster by mistakes, for example, accidentally open a 10 GiB file in a web browser or a text editor. In this case, the OOM algorithm will always kill Firefox without affecting others, and it's preciously what I need. Killing Firefox (due to a webpage with runaway JavaScript) while keeping my unsaved text editor running is desirable, even if it's not guaranteed, but statistically much better than killing the computer.
I often use Alt + Sysrq to manually activate the OOM killer, in case the kernel doesn't automatically detect memory exhaustion fast enough. And it works pretty nice for me. I found that, at the worst case scenario, nearly the entire desktop will be killed (rarely occurs, often it simply kills the offending process), but I can still restart my desktop in a minute, instead of spending five minutes to reboot the hardware.