NAME

       earlyoom - Early OOM Daemon

SYNOPSIS

       earlyoom [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION

       The  oom-killer  generally  has  a  bad  reputation among Linux users. One may have to sit in front of an
       unresponsive system, listening to the grinding disk for minutes, and press the reset button and get  back
       to what was doing quickly after running out of patience.

       earlyoom  checks  the amount of available memory and free swap 10 times a second.  If both are below 10%,
       it will kill the largest process. The percentage value is configurable via command line arguments.

OPTIONS

       -m PERCENT
              set available memory minimum to PERCENT of total (default 10 %)

       -s PERCENT
              set free swap minimum to PERCENT of total (default 10 %)

       -M SIZE
              set available memory minimum to SIZE KiB

       -S SIZE
              set free swap minimum to SIZE KiB

       -k     use kernel oom killer instead of own user-space implementation

       -i     user-space oom killer should ignore positive oom_score_adj values

       -d     enable debugging messages

       -v     print version information and exit

       -r INTERVAL
              memory report interval in seconds (default 1), set to 0 to disable completely

       -p     set niceness of earlyoom to -20 and oom_score_adj to -1000

       --prefer REGEX
              prefer killing processes matching REGEX (adds 300 to oom_score)

       --avoid REGEX
              avoid killing processes matching REGEX (subtracts 300 from oom_score)

       -h     this help text

EXIT STATUS

       0      Successful program execution.

       1      Usage printed (using -h).

       2      Switch conflict.

       4      Could not cd to /proc

       5      Could not open proc

       7      Could not open /proc/sysrq-trigger

       13     Unknown options.

       14     Wrong parameters for other options.

       15     Wrong parameters for memory threshold.

       16     Wrong parameters for swap threshold.

       102    Could not open /proc/meminfo

       103    Could not read /proc/meminfo

       104    Could not find a specific entry in /proc/meminfo

       105    Could not convert number when parse the contents of /proc/meminfo

Why not trigger the kernel oom killer?

       Earlyoom does not use echo f > /proc/sysrq-trigger because the Chrome people made their browser always be
       the first (innocent!)  victim by setting oom_score_adj very high. Instead, earlyoom finds out  itself  by
       reading  through  /proc/*/status  (actually  /proc/*/statm  ,  which contains the same information but is
       easier to parse programmatically).

       Additionally, in recent kernels (tested on 4.0.5), triggering the kernel oom killer manually may not work
       at all. That is, it may only free some graphics memory (that will be allocated immediately again) and not
       actually kill any process.

MEMORY USAGE

       About 0.6MB RSS. All memory is locked using mlockall() to make sure earlyoom does not slow  down  in  low
       memory situations.

AUTHOR

       The author of earlyoom is Jakob Unterwurzacher.

       This manual page was written by Yangfl, for the Debian project (and may be used by others).

                                                                                                     earlyoom(1)