On Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 04:51:42PM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote: > Per default, the OOM killer will engage after 15 seconds of at least > 80% memory pressure. These values are tunable via sysctls > vm.thrashing_oom_period and vm.thrashing_oom_level. Let's go with this: Per default, the OOM killer will engage after 15 seconds of at least 80% memory pressure. From experience, at 80% the user is experiencing multi-second reaction times. 15 seconds is chosen to be long enough to not OOM kill a short-lived spike that might resolve itself, yet short enough for users to not press the reset button just yet.