On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Mahmood Naderan wrote: > >The default behavior is to kill all eligible and unkillable threads until > >there are none left to sacrifice (i.e. all kthreads and OOM_DISABLE). > > In a simple test with virtualbox, I reduced the amount of ram to 300MB. > Then I ran "swapoff -a" and opened some applications. I noticed that the free > spaces is kept around 2-3MB and "kswapd" is running. Also I saw that disk > activity was very high. > That mean although "swap" partition is turned off, "kswapd" was trying to do > something. I wonder how that behavior can be explained? > Despite it's name, kswapd is still active, it's trying to reclaim memory to prevent having to kill a process as the last resort. If /proc/sys/vm/panic_on_oom is not set, as previously mentioned, then we'll need the kernel log to diagnose this further.