Description of problem: We're seeing Adobe Reader plugins processes runaway and consume all available memory. While that is the main problem, I'm surprised that the oom-killer appears to be unable to kill those processes and get the system usable. The machine becomes completely unresponsive and needs to be power cycled. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.6.24.3-34.fc8 How reproducible: Very Steps to Reproduce: 1. On some F-8 machines with Adobe Reader 8.1.2 plugin, open a PDF in browser then navigate away. 2. Let acroread process grow to consume memory. Systems have 1-2GB RAM and 2GB swap.
is it killing other processes instead ? or is it just chugging along slowly ?
Created attachment 299064 [details] oom killer run It's hard to tell. Mostly it seems like it doesn't do anything. Often when I reboot the machine I don't see any oom messages in /var/log/messages. I've attached one where it killed an (I believe) inconsequential process. By the time I get to a system, I can't switch VTs or ssh to log in as root to see what's up.
If it's not killing anything, the kernel believes that the application is making forward progress (albeit slowly). It won't kill until there's absolutely no way to satisfy an allocation (after paging out everything that can be paged out, and using up all ram). I'm not sure there's anything we can really do in this situation other than setting reasonable ulimits. Setting /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory to 2 may lead to a different failure mode that may work better, but it's not really something that we can set universally.
Do you have a sysrq-m output from this box during the period when memory is getting consumed? Its possible that its not memory thats getting eaten up. Perhaps its hogging the cpu instead. Not that its much consolation, but it would be nice to get a clear view of the resource thats getting consumed here.
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