I’m not sure what this comic is trying to say but in my recent experience a single misbehaving website can still consume all available swap at which point Linux will sometimes completely lock up for many minutes before the out-of-memory killer decides what to kill - and then sometimes it still kills the desktop environment instead of the browser.
(I do know how to use oom_adj
; I’m talking about the default configuration on popular desktop distros.)
The canonical documentation is https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst (ctrl-f
oom
) but if you search a bit you’ll find various guides that might be easier to digest.https://www.baeldung.com/linux/memory-overcommitment-oom-killer looks like an informative recent article on the subject, and reminds me that my knowledge is a bit outdated. (TIL about the choom(1) command which was added to util-linux in 2018 as an alternative to manipulating things in
/proc
directly…)https://dev.to/rrampage/surviving-the-linux-oom-killer-2ki9 from 2018 might also be worth reading.
How to make your adjustments persist for a given desktop application is left as an exercise to the reader :)