oom-killer gets triggered when there is plenty of memory still available

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#3,872 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
linux

Research direction

Start by examining the attached dmesg.txt alongside the reported Raspberry Pi 4B, Raspbian 10, firmware, and kernel versions. Determine why the OOM killer runs despite the reported available memory, reproduce the behavior if possible, and verify that the issue no longer kills the download-management programs under comparable conditions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Using this machine as a torrent downloader with Transmission, Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett, etc. I know these programs are heavy on RAM, but oom-killer gets triggered even when memory usage is lower than 1,5 or 1GB. Tried using a 2GB swapfile (which never gets too used) without solving the issue. Every 8-12 hours OOM reaper kills all download managing programs, even Transmission.

To reproduce
Not sure, probably adding some memory hungry program helps reproduce.

Expected behaviour
oom-killer should only trigger when memory and swap are really scarce..

Actual behaviour
oom-killer gets triggered even when memory usage is low, even < 1GB.

System

  • Which model of Raspberry Pi? Rpi4B Rev 1.2 4GB
  • Which OS and version (cat /etc/rpi-issue)? Raspbian GNU/Linux 10
  • Which firmware version (vcgencmd version)? version 4439d2aaa6c376a2d1ef4402f142e1cf4de37c43 (clean) (release) (start)
  • Which kernel version (uname -a)? 5.4.51-v7l+

Logs
dmesg.txt

Dominant language
C
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