Hello,

the OOM killer just killed some of my processes while the system still
had >2.5 GB of free swap. I'm running vanilla 2.6.15 on my desktop.
The machine is a single Athlon64, 1 GB RAM, 3 GB swap, x86_64 kernel,
(mostly) i386 userland.  A few days ago I have set
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness to 0 to see whether it would increase the
interactive performance. This was successful to some extent but with
side effects as I just saw:

I was compiling QT4 in /tmp which is a tmpfs, size 2.5 GB, of which
~1.0 GB were used at that moment. This was when the OOM killer decided
to kill some (appearently random) processes.

I was able to reproduce this behaviour a few minutes later.  After
setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness to 10 everything is ok again. I have
attached the kernel messages of the oom killer.

Regards,
Jim