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+tags: linux
+date: 2020-01-25
+certainty: likely
+status: initial
+title: Preventing out-of-memory (OOM) errors on Linux
+
+# Preventing out-of-memory (OOM) errors on Linux
+
+I’ve been running out of memory more and more often lately. I don’t use any swap space because I am of the opinion that 16GB of memory should be sufficient for most daily and professional tasks. Which is generally true, however sometimes I have a runaway filling my memory. Emacs is very good at doing this for example, prone to filling your RAM when you open json files with very long lines.
+
+In theory, the kernel OOM killer should come in and save the day, but the Linux OOM killer is notorious for being extremely … conservative. It will try to free every internal structure it can before even thinking about touching any userspace processes. At that point, the desktop usually stopped responding minutes ago.
+
+Luckily the kernel provides memory statistics for the whole system, as well as single process, and the [`earlyoom`](https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom) tool uses those to keep memory usage under a certain limit. It will start killing processes, “heaviest” first, until the given upper memory limit is satisfied again.
+
+On NixOS, I set:
+
+```nix
+{
+  services.earlyoom = {
+    enable = true;
+    freeMemThreshold = 5; # <%5 free
+  };
+}
+```
+
+and after activation, this simple test shows whether the daemon is working:
+
+```shell
+$ tail /dev/zero
+fish: “tail /dev/zero” terminated by signal SIGTERM (Polite quit request)
+```
+
+`tail /dev/zero` searches for the last line of the file `/dev/zero`, and since it cannot know that there is no next line and no end to the stream of `\0` this file produces, it will fill the RAM as quickly as physically possible. Before it can fill it completely, `earlyoom` recognizes that the limit was breached, singles out the `tail` command as the process using the most amount of memory, and sends it a `SIGTERM`.