earlyoom spamming the logs

[b3taman]

After making the (major) decision to switch to openSUSE for everything I was very happy to discover GeckoLinux, especially to use for my parents-in-law in an old age home, since KDE is now relatively light-weight, it has the requisite eye candy for my iPad-using mother-in-law, and their ancient ex-XP box should be sufficient to run it all, even though it has only 4 GB RAM (usage limited pretty much to watching YouTube in Firefox).

Just before delivery I discovered this line every three seconds in the journal:

Oct 09 08:00:13 joplin earlyoom[925]: mem avail:  2398 of  3633 MiB (66 %), swap free: 4145 of 4145 MiB (100 %)

Between 04:59:41 and 08:00:13 there were 3,611 such entries in the journal, but system resources seemed absolutely fine to me:

# free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        3720708      865884     1690988      174416     1163836     2406792
Swap:       4244988           0     4244988

# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs           1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           727M   82M  646M  12% /run
tmpfs           4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1       150G  8.6G  140G   6% /
/dev/sda1       150G  8.6G  140G   6% /swap
/dev/sda1       150G  8.6G  140G   6% /home
tmpfs           364M   40K  364M   1% /run/user/1000
tmpfs           364M   32K  364M   1% /run/user/0

top reported load average: 0.00, 0.05, 0.06, so what is going on with earlyoom and its defaults?

[geckolinux]

Hi there, thanks for the reporting this, and I'm glad that GeckoLinux and openSUSE are otherwise meeting your needs.

The earlyoom log thing is indeed rather irritating, although it's just a harmless report, not a warning. I found the same report here: https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom/commit/e1c74d918c3951e0ec20bd8817ab55530e020491 Since Leap uses an older version of earlyoom that improvement isn't included yet by default. But it can be adjusted in the /etc/sysconfig/earlyoom file, change the number after -r to something much higher or put 0 to disable the log report completely.

[b3taman]

Thank you! My file had -f 3, which is hardly useful except, perhaps, in testing.

I changed it to every 5 minutes (-r 300) and ran systemctl restart earlyoom, which unfortunately put the following in the journal:

Oct 09 15:10:36 joplin earlyoom[4678]: Could not set priority: Permission denied. Continuing anyway
Oct 09 15:10:36 joplin earlyoom[4678]: Could not set oom_score_adj: Permission denied. Continuing anyway

It seems to be working, but those two errors were unexpected.