Re: PostgreSQL 8.0.6 crash

On Friday 10 February 2006 00:53, Mark Woodward wrote:
> > Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> >> When people talk about disabling the OOM killer, it doesn't stop the
> >> SIGKILL behaviour,
> >
> > Yes it does, because the situation will never arise.
> >
> >> it just causes the kernel to return -ENOMEM for
> >> malloc() much much earlier... (ie when you still actually have memory
> >> available).
> >
> > Given the current price of disk, there is no sane reason not to have
> > enough swap space configured to make this not-a-problem.  The OOM kill
> > mechanism was a reasonable solution for running systems that were not
> > expected to be too reliable anyway on small hardware, but if you're
> > trying to run a 24/7 server you're simply incompetent if you don't
> > disable it.
>
> And people say I have STRONG opinions. Don't hold back Tom, let us know
> what you really think.

Read 
http://linux-mm.org/OverCommitAccounting
or 
file://usr/src/linux/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting

It is a good idea to have enough swap space. If not, set 
vm.overcommit_memory=2