Understanding the Linux oom-killer’s logs

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Memory management in Linux is a bit tricky to understand, and I can’t say I fully understand it yet, but I’ll try to share a little bit of my experience and knowledge.

Short answer to your question: Yes there are other stuff included than whats in the list.

What’s being shown in your list is applications run in userspace. The kernel uses memory for itself and modules, on top of that it also has a lower limit of free memory that you can’t go under. When you’ve reached that level it will try to free up resources, and when it can’t do that anymore, you end up with an OOM problem.

From the last line of your list you can read that the kernel reports a total-vm usage of: 1498536kB (1,5GB), where the total-vm includes both your physical RAM and swap space. You stated you don’t have any swap but the kernel seems to think otherwise since your swap space is reported to be full (Total swap = 524284kB, Free swap = 0kB) and it reports a total vmem size of 1,5GB.

Another thing that can complicate things further is memory fragmentation. You can hit the OOM killer when the kernel tries to allocate lets say 4096kB of continous memory, but there are no free ones availible.

Now that alone probably won’t help you solve the actual problem. I don’t know if it’s normal for your program to require that amount of memory, but I would recommend to try a static code analyzer like cppcheck to check for memory leaks or file descriptor leaks. You could also try to run it through Valgrind to get a bit more information out about memory usage.

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