Systemd-oomd frequently kills applications on 8GB RAM machine

[Umayr Saghir]

On a machine with 8GB of RAM, systemd-oomd will frequently kill applications. This has been most apparent for me when using Firefox with quite a lot of tabs open. This could probably be avoided by being more disciplined with the number of tabs in use but shouldn't need to be an active consideration for the user. I think this is less of a bug with systemd-oomd as it is effectively doing its job when memory is low, but rather I think this is more a case of the default amount of swap (1GB) not being sufficient if only 8GB of RAM is present.

Attached output of `journalctl -u systemd-oomd.service` to show the frequency of applications being killed

Description: Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish (development branch)
Release: 22.04

systemd-oomd:
  Installed: 249.11-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 249.11-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 249.11-0ubuntu3 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
Package: systemd-oomd 249.11-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.15.0-25.25-generic 5.15.30
Uname: Linux 5.15.0-25-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Apr 15 21:32:59 2022
InstallationDate: Installed on 2022-03-31 (14 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Beta amd64 (20220329.1)
SourcePackage: systemd
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your report. There were some improvements that landed to fix bug #1966381 but you already have that version. The log shows you are indeed hitting the ram/swap limits from your machine so it might be the expected behaviour to avoid getting the machine locking up for minutes

what's the output of
$ free -h

before you hit the issue?

[Umayr Saghir (nightmayr)]

The output for free before getting too close to the issue is:

                       total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7.7Gi 4.3Gi 840Mi 1.5Gi 2.6Gi 1.6Gi
Swap: 975Mi 351Mi 624Mi

That's with 17 tabs open in Firefox.

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

This was fixed in bug 1972159.