[14:30] <linuxr> hello anyone..so I've just had this situation where my 4 gigs of memory were exhausted because of firefox, resulting in a complete system freeze. How can this happen in 2020? How can one single process take all the memory and not being prevented by the OS?
[14:31] <linuxr> what about OOM-killer?
[14:32] <ogra_> what about it ? it randomly kills processes if you run out of ram
[14:33] <ogra_> (it is a blindfolded berserk ...)
[14:34] <linuxr> ogra_, apparently it did not work at all
[14:36] <ogra_> well, it only kicks in if all your ram *and* all your swap space is used up ... are you sure the system wasnt still swapping ?
[14:38] <linuxr> ogra_, maybe it was, but the music stopped, the cursor froze, and keyboard was dead
[14:38] <linuxr> I'd prefer to completely disable swap then, how would I do that?
[14:39] <trippeh> generally it will remain locked up for a while before it recovers (the situation is a bit sad, yes)
[14:39] <trippeh> a while = could be hours
[14:39] <linuxr> lol..can this somehow be tuned to agressively kill havoc processes?
[14:39] <ogra_> iirc if you disable swap the kernel uses a completely different code path for memory mgmt ... not sure thats a good idea
[14:40] <ogra_> (not sure if it still does it ... it was around 3.x times i looked at that last)
[14:41] <linuxr> there must be a way to fix this
[14:42] <linuxr> I mean, any shitty website can mess up my system as it appears
[14:42] <ogra_> systemd is working on fixing it by trying to add an "intelligent" oom killer ... but not sure how far out that is
[14:43] <ogra_> but yeah ... DOSing isnt easy to work against ... 
[14:43] <trippeh> generally, disabling overcommit helps - but there also plenty of things that expect to overcommit a lot, so.
[14:46] <linuxr> I'd be quite happy with a script that periodically checks memory usage and kills the most agressive process(es) in case a critical level is reached
[14:46] <linuxr> how hard can it be to implement something like that?
[14:48] <ogra_> try it ?
[14:50] <ogra_> (i'm sure there is prior art though ... and you can always set the oom_score for your processes if needed so they get killed first)
[14:50] <linuxr> the bad thing is, I've been using linux for over a decade and cannot remember something like this was happening in all that time
[14:51] <ogra_> well, then facebook came aroud and created full apps inside your browser windows 
[14:52] <ogra_> (and filled the remaining free ram with ads)
[14:53] <linuxr> maybe that is the problem
[14:53] <linuxr> web bloat
[14:53] <ogra_> tell mark zuckerberg 😛
[14:53] <linuxr> but still, this should not tear down my system
[14:54] <linuxr> it should just be handled properly (e.g. killed) when it gets too nasty