What is the best way to prevent out of memory (OOM) freezes on Linux?

Question

Is there a way to make the OOM killer work and prevent Linux from freezing? I've been running Java and C# applications, where any memory allocated is usually used, and (if I'm understanding them right) overcommits are causing the machine to freeze. Right now, as a temporary solution, I added,

vm.overcommit_memory = 2
vm.overcommit_ratio = 10

to /etc/sysctl.conf.

Kudos to anyone who can explain why the existing OOM killer can't function correctly in a guaranteed manner, killing processes whenever the kernel runs out of "real" memory.

EDIT -- many responses are along the lines of Michael's "if you are experiencing OOM killer related problems, then you probably need to fix whatever is causing you to run out of memory". I don't think this is the correct solution. There will always be apps with bugs, and I'd like to adjust the kernel so my entire system doesn't freeze. Given my current technical understandings, this doesn't seem like it should be impossible.

Answer 1

Below is a really basic perl script I wrote. With a bit of tweaking it could be useful. You just need to change the paths I have to the paths of any processes that use Java or C#. You could change the kill commands I've used to restart commands also. Of course to avoid typing in perl memusage.pl manually, you could put it into your crontab file to run automatically. You could also use perl memusage.pl > log.txt to save its output to a log file. Sorry if it doesn't really help, but I was bored while drinking a cup of coffee. :-D Cheers

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Checks available memory usage and calculates size in MB
# If free memory is below your minimum level specified, then
# the script will attempt to close the troublesome processes down
# that you specify. If it can't, it will issue a -9 KILL signal.
#
# Uses external commands (cat and pidof)
#
# Cheers, insertable

our $memmin = 50;
our @procs = qw(/usr/bin/firefox /usr/local/sbin/apache2);

sub killProcs
{
    use vars qw(@procs);
    my @pids = ();
    foreach $proc (@procs)
    {
        my $filename=substr($proc, rindex($proc,"/")+1,length($proc)-rindex($proc,"/")-1);
        my $pid = `pidof $filename`;
        chop($pid);
        my @pid = split(/ /,$pid);
        push @pids, $pid[0];
    }
    foreach $pid (@pids)
    {
        #try to kill process normall first
        system("kill -15 " . $pid); 
        print "Killing " . $pid . "\n";
        sleep 1;
        if (-e "/proc/$pid")
        {
            print $pid . " is still alive! Issuing a -9 KILL...\n";
            system("kill -9 " + $pid);
            print "Done.\n";
        } else {
            print "Looks like " . $pid . " is dead\n";
        }
    }
    print "Successfully finished destroying memory-hogging processes!\n";
    exit(0);
}

sub checkMem
{
    use vars qw($memmin);
    my ($free) = $_[0];
    if ($free > $memmin)
    {
        print "Memory usage is OK\n";
        exit(0);
    } else {
        killProcs();
    }
}

sub main
{
    my $meminfo = `cat /proc/meminfo`;
    chop($meminfo);
    my @meminfo = split(/\n/,$meminfo);
    foreach my $line (@meminfo)
    {
        if ($line =~ /^MemFree:\s+(.+)\skB$/)
        {
            my $free = ($1 / 1024);
            &checkMem($free);
        }
    }
}

main();