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I am getting Out of Memory errors while my swap isn't touched. I have 4GB of ram and 4GB of swap space. I enabled the swap via swapon and when doing free, I see the swap listed there.

I'm thinking that perhaps there is some issue with overlayfs / tmpfs and swap all working together. I have always had the opposite problem, trying to prevent swap usage, so I can't seem to figure out what changed.

Also, I am using a grsecurity enabled kernel. Is it possible that memory allocation work differently under there?

Snapshot of free:

                      total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
          Mem:        3586392      157292       67052      141664     3362048     3236524
          Swap:       4194300           0     4194300

After I added the swap configuration to /etc/fstab, these numbers have changed; however, I still don't see any swap usage. The only other thing I changed was the tmpfs size for /dev/shm and my overlayfs volume (/rw). Both of which were not using much space to begin with, so the change should not have had any impact.

                      total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
          Mem:        3586392      571392     1714036      146096     1300964     2818004
          Swap:       4194300           0     4194300

I restarted a bunch of services and they're still running, and the biggest difference I see is that free memory is now showing 1.7GB free versus 67MB prior.

I'm still confused as to why that had any impact. If I enable swap through swapon, it should behave the same way as if I configure it through /etc/fstab and do swapon -a. Furthermore, it isn't even being used yet anyways.

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  • have you checked if user-limits are in effect? check with ulimit -v for a memory limit. A second thought: if you are using a java program then you have to check the memory parameters of the java-vm. – murphy Oct 9 '16 at 6:52
  • I don't have user limits in effect, and I don't have a java program eating up the memory. Why would that matter - don't I have a total of 8GB of memory that can be allocated roughly? – Walter Oct 9 '16 at 10:43
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    The jvm doesn't use all available memory. So if the program that gets an OOM is java-based, it is maybe limited by the jvm not the os. – murphy Oct 9 '16 at 11:23
  • I later got an OOM even after the above changes, so nothing really changed. – Walter Oct 11 '16 at 13:29
  • The peculiar thing is that I have about 3.2GB acting as a cache / buffer while only about 200MB is actually used according to free. Memory usage / free space isn't being calculated properly, because, if the machine were truly out of memory, shouldn't the cache be discarded for actual use? – Walter Oct 16 '16 at 3:50
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This was a bug with the version of the kernel I was using.

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    It might help if you tell what kernel version it was, even better a link to the bug description. – jlliagre Nov 21 '16 at 19:08

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