How the Linux OOM Killer Chooses, and Why It Picked Your App

Under memory pressure the kernel kills one process and not another, and it is not random. The oom score is a small arithmetic formula you can read, tune and…

How the Linux OOM Killer Chooses, and Why It Picked Your App. Abstract deep dive illustration in orange and dark grey on debugly.dev
oom_score_adj Effect
-1000 Completely exempt from being killed
negative Protected, used for things like sshd
0 Default, score is purely memory based
positive Penalised, used to mark sacrificial processes

Published on debugly.dev by Rohit Bhadani | Founder of Krova Cloud