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Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

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21–30 of 175 posts

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#21
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Ubuntu still keeps running out of space in /boot by filling it w old kernels in the default partition profile. A bug that I've been hitting since about 2011. In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be.

My M.O. is: # apt-get update # aptitude full-upgrade # apt-get autoremove Because as far as I can tell, apt-get sometimes fails to actually update things, whereas aptitude can't autoremove. I'm sure there's a better way. This is my major gripe with the dpkg ecosystem. There are (AFAICT) multiple different tools to build dpgks and multiple different tools for updating your system, and none of them are adequately docum…

AFAIK, the only supported way to build a deb is using dpkg-buildpackage, and all the others just wrap it (unless we're talking about alien, but that's not really "supported" going any direction).

Updating your system is all the same backend, and the Debian-alikes try to tell you to only use one tool for cmdline (apt, now, which just takes the same args as all the various apt-FOO commands did, all of which still work), and one for the GUI (Synaptic, or wrappers around it, unless Ubuntu Software Center has mutated a lot since I last looked).

IIRC they made a big deal about not installing aptitude (a popular alternate text UI for apt-based systems) by default on Ubuntu _because_ they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#22
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Ubuntu still keeps running out of space in /boot by filling it w old kernels in the default partition profile. A bug that I've been hitting since about 2011. In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be.

You can run `apt-get autoremove` and it will purge old kernels/headers for you (amongst any other no-longer-used dependencies).

Oh, I know it's easy to fix, I just single that bug out as "I have done nothing with this box but install updates and surf the web. I am Grandma. It breaks".

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#23
post #12

I stopped using Ubuntu after Amazon affiliate marketing showed up on the desktop. I stopped using Arch after I read the source code for SystemD. FreeBSD had quite a learning curve, but now it's on my laptops and is my preferred server OS. I love DTrace. I love ZFS. I love pf. I love Jails. I love ports, even though I generally use pkg. I love how easy it is to compile a kernel. The FreeBSD handbook is awesome. All th…

May I ask what's so bad with the SystemD source?

I wouldn't say that it's bad. I just find it to be quite complex, e.g., why does it need its own web server? I was also troubled by the number of Debian maintainers who left the Debian project over the intense controversy, as well as Linus's comments.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#24
post #2

It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result. Regardless, it's things like this why we never recommend people use Ubuntu - years of poorly packaged and tested software. If you wan…

IMHO if you can't not use swap without running out of memory in normal workloads, you either need more RAM or to work on reducing your memory consumption; swapping is for temporary overloads or gracefully recovering from one, not a substitute for RAM.

It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result.

That's a surprising behaviour change (from the perspective of "don't break userspace"), but looks more like a "fix of previously broken behaviour" as in 0 not being able to disable swap entirely; from that perspective, using 1 makes sense.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#25
post #12

I stopped using Ubuntu after Amazon affiliate marketing showed up on the desktop. I stopped using Arch after I read the source code for SystemD. FreeBSD had quite a learning curve, but now it's on my laptops and is my preferred server OS. I love DTrace. I love ZFS. I love pf. I love Jails. I love ports, even though I generally use pkg. I love how easy it is to compile a kernel. The FreeBSD handbook is awesome. All th…

So you came from Arch, and thought FreeBSD had quite a learning curve? Hmm maybe I should rethink FreeBSD and stick with Mint.

FreeBSD has been a learning curve for me in terms of learning kernel development and things like kqueue and ZFS. I didn't find it difficult in terms of getting started, since it is a lot like Arch in terms of setting up things like X windows.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#26
post #12

I stopped using Ubuntu after Amazon affiliate marketing showed up on the desktop. I stopped using Arch after I read the source code for SystemD. FreeBSD had quite a learning curve, but now it's on my laptops and is my preferred server OS. I love DTrace. I love ZFS. I love pf. I love Jails. I love ports, even though I generally use pkg. I love how easy it is to compile a kernel. The FreeBSD handbook is awesome. All th…

So you came from Arch, and thought FreeBSD had quite a learning curve? Hmm maybe I should rethink FreeBSD and stick with Mint.

Neither are that hard, FreeBSD has the additional challenge of overcoming Linuxisms. Just takes a little reading, and the FreeBSD Handbook is an excellent work.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#27
post #4
post #2

It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result. Regardless, it's things like this why we never recommend people use Ubuntu - years of poorly packaged and tested software. If you wan…

Centos/rhel are on a pretty old kernel at this point though?

For Centos 7 its 3.10 according to good old http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=centos

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#28
post #2

It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result. Regardless, it's things like this why we never recommend people use Ubuntu - years of poorly packaged and tested software. If you wan…

IMHO if you can't not use swap without running out of memory in normal workloads, you either need more RAM or to work on reducing your memory consumption; swapping is for temporary overloads or gracefully recovering from one, not a substitute for RAM. It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as…

Funny, but Linux is the only unix-like OS I've ever run where using swap means you have a problem. Other OSes have much more intelligent memory management.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#29
post #2

It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result. Regardless, it's things like this why we never recommend people use Ubuntu - years of poorly packaged and tested software. If you wan…

IMHO if you can't not use swap without running out of memory in normal workloads, you either need more RAM or to work on reducing your memory consumption; swapping is for temporary overloads or gracefully recovering from one, not a substitute for RAM. It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as…

Swap makes a lot of sense for a consumer device, where I'm opening a big spreadsheet, then putting that in background to edit this video.

It makes less sense for server workloads, where you usually don't have huge chunks of inactive memory.

I always run with no swap in AWS, especially with the newer EBS-only families.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04: “Out of memory” errors after upgrade to 4.4.0-59

#30
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO if you can't not use swap without running out of memory in normal workloads, you either need more RAM or to work on reducing your memory consumption; swapping is for temporary overloads or gracefully recovering from one, not a substitute for RAM. It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as…

Funny, but Linux is the only unix-like OS I've ever run where using swap means you have a problem. Other OSes have much more intelligent memory management.

For me swap is an error. I would rather a server crash then go into swap and run slow.

If your servers are at 75% CPU and start swapping you are screwed. Time to start adding servers. In this day and age you are wasting a lot of money to be sitting around waiting for swap.

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