RE: [Xen-devel] OOM problems

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 15.11.10 at 10:40, Daniel Stodden <daniel.stodden@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 03:55 -0500, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> >>> On 13.11.10 at 10:13, Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >>   > What do the guests use for storage? (e.g. "blktap2 for VHD files on
>> >> an iscsi mounted ext3 volume")
>> >> 
>> >> Simple sparse .img files on a local ext4 RAID volume, using "file:".
>> > 
>> > Ah, if you're using loop it may be that you're just filling memory with 
>> > dirty pages. Older kernels certainly did this, not sure about newer ones.
>> 
>> Shouldn't this lead to the calling process being throttled, instead of
>> the system running into OOM?
> 
> They are throttled, but the single control I'm aware of
> is /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio (or dirty_bytes, nowadays). Which is only
> per process, not a global limit. Could well be that's part of the
> problem -- outwitting mm with just too many writers on too many cores?
> 
> We had a bit of trouble when switching dom0 to 2.6.32, buffered writes
> made it much easier than with e.g. 2.6.27 to drive everybody else into
> costly reclaims.
> 
> The Oom shown here reports about ~650M in dirty pages. The fact alone
> that this counts as on oom condition doesn't sound quite right in
> itself. That qemu might just have dared to ask at the wrong point in
> time.

Indeed - dirty pages alone shouldn't resolve to OOM.

> Just to get an idea -- how many guests did this box carry?

>From what we know this requires just a single (Windows 7 or some
such) guest, provided the guest has more memory than Dom0.

Jan


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel