On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 10:50:32AM -0800, Shakeel Butt wrote: > From the start of the git history of Linux, the kernel after selecting > the worst process to be oom-killed, prefer to kill its child (if the > child does not share mm with the parent). Later it was changed to prefer > to kill a child who is worst. If the parent is still the worst then the > parent will be killed. > > This heuristic assumes that the children did less work than their parent > and by killing one of them, the work lost will be less. However this is > very workload dependent. If there is a workload which can benefit from > this heuristic, can use oom_score_adj to prefer children to be killed > before the parent. > > The select_bad_process() has already selected the worst process in the > system/memcg. There is no need to recheck the badness of its children > and hoping to find a worse candidate. That's a lot of unneeded racy > work. Also the heuristic is dangerous because it make fork bomb like > workloads to recover much later because we constantly pick and kill > processes which are not memory hogs. So, let's remove this whole > heuristic. This is a great cleanup, thanks! Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@xxxxxx>