How OOM Killer Affects Processes on Linux

Out-of-memory (OOM) killer is a daemon on most Linux machines that watches memory usage on a machine and can potentially terminate processes with usage. Software packages published by Synametrics have a configuration parameter that caps the maximum memory used. A built-in garbage collector constantly cleans up memory usage. However, if the amount of used memory reaches very close to the maximum configured memory, the garbage collector becomes very active and consumes a lot of CPU. This makes the process a good candidate for getting terminated by OOM.

This page describes how to check if OOM has terminated a process and how to configure it. This article assumes you're using Syncrify.

Symptoms

Syncrify server stops without any reason, and the log file ($INSTALL_DIR\logs\Syncrify.log) does not report any errors.

Troubleshooting

Try the following steps:

• Connect to your Linux box using SSH
• Run the following commands:
  grep -i kill /var/log/messages*
  grep -i kill /var/log/kern.log
• You will see the following message as the result if OOM killed Syncrify:

  host kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 8595 (syncrify).

Next Steps

You could take several steps after confirming OOM is indeed terminating Syncrify. For example:

• Configure OOM. Click here for some tips.
• Add more memory to the machine.