How to diagnose causes of oom-killer killing processes

Posted by dunxd on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by dunxd
Published on 2010-04-21T22:48:12Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 22:53 UTC
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linux

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centos

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rhel5

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error

I have a small virtual private server running CentOS and www/mail/db, which has recently had a couple of incidents where the web server and ssh became unresponsive.

Looking at the logs, I saw that oom-killer had killed these processes, possibly due to running out of memory and swap.

Can anyone give me some pointers at how to diagnose what may have caused the most recent incident? Is it likely the first process killed? Where else should I be looking?

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