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OOMProf: Profiling on the Brink
Using eBPF to record your programs dying breathes
This is the part of the kernel that attempts to maintain forward progress when faced with the impossible situation of applications wanting to use more memory than the system has. Long slow leak style bugs can usually be drawn out and spotted with sampling memory profiling solutions (happily available in production environments in most ecosystems these days) but when things go off the rails quickly it can be surprisingly difficult to get clues as to what happened. It may be we need to have a sacrificial "canary" process(with a high oom_score_adj) that carries some memory "ballast" to make OOM reporting more predictable but our experiments with that path got messy so we're avoiding that for now and will wait to see how this thing does in the field before looking at that again.
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