[Discuss] memory management

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Addressing some random questions:
 -this is a Fedora box.  Currently v21, but I've had these types of
issues for years.
 - top, when I can get it to run, shows virtually no CPU use.  The only
thing  that is getting to run is kswapd0 if I recall correctly.
 - I do have way to many tabs open in firefox.  I thought the recent
changes to not load pages in other tabs on startup meant that it was a
little more forgiving in terms of memory of having a 100+ tabs open that
you never actually load.  I can certainly change my use-pattern there.

Swappiness doesn't really help here. That just controls how eager linux
is to swap something out.  Once you're out of physical RAM, the OS is
going to start swapping if it can. What I want for desktop environments
is behavior like: if you run out of memory, kill the thing that's
hogging the most.  My typical case is that if there is a process using a
ton of memory, it's probably doing something wrong (e.g. javascript, or
eclipse going into a death spiral because of the awful Android plugin),
and /that/ is what I want OOM-killer to murder.

I suppose the right answer is to wrap the problem programs in a script
so that every time I start them I can
  echo 999 > /proc/[firefox-pid]/oom_score_adj

Anyone ever had to use cpuset(7) for anything?

Thanks,
Matt