Bug 1853862

Summary:	[mm] System locked up for over an hour during memory reclaim
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8	Reporter:	Charles Haithcock <chaithco>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Donghai Qiao <dqiao>
kernel sub component:	Memory Management	QA Contact:	Ping Fang <pifang>
Status:	CLOSED INSUFFICIENT_DATA	Docs Contact:
Severity:	high
Priority:	high	CC:	asanders, cye, dqiao, llong, mm-maint, qbarnes
Version:	8.3
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	8.0
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
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Last Closed:	2020-10-16 17:03:27 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Charles Haithcock 2020-07-04 22:00:08 UTC

Description of problem:

Customer is noting on their RHEL 8.2 laptop with 16 GiB of memory and no swapspace that the system hangs for an indeterminate amount of time. Through investigations, it appears the particular workload of the customer within firefox is causing firefox to consume memory gradually until the point of oom killer invocation. That being said, the time between the beginning of doing direct reclaim and forcing pretty severe major faulting activity systemwide up to the oom killer invocation can be quite variant. 


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

4.18.0-193.1.2.el8_2.x86_64


How reproducible:

Pretty reliable



Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have the customer run firefox with a large number of tabs and cause pretty severe memory pressure
2. wait until system begins to hang
3.

Actual results:

System can hang for a few minutes to over an hour

Expected results:

customer expects the system to recover quickly

Additional info:

Customer has been provided a workaround with using cgroups to limit the memory usage of firefox. However, the hangs can still happen and firefox is killed more often.

Comment 17 Charles Haithcock 2020-10-16 17:03:27 UTC

Hey all, 

Closing out the BZ due to lack of response from the customer. Thank you all for the help internally on this matter.