Tuning the oom killer / low memory killer

direc85 · 2 September 2022 08:15

Just a quick update!

I have been using the minfree values of 65536,73728,90112,131072,196608 and so far I have been very happy with these! While I may not get the maximum amount of opened applications at the same, I think 12 is plenty good! I’ve also had zero OOM kills since.

I stand my opinion that the X10III ships with too conservative memory limits and they can be safely lowered to some extent without risking OOM at application startup, and providing a much better user experience.

Edit: I simply haven’t had more than 12 apps opened at the same time.

thigg · 2 September 2022 08:55

Didsomeone find something that helped with the 10II ? I tried half of jollas defaults and got weird crashes

direc85 · 2 September 2022 08:59

I tested the halving briefly, and had similar results, unfortunately.

It looks like the limits are quite well tuned for X10II. If that is indeed the case, I see no reason to double the values for X10III only because it has double the RAM.

We are slowly narrowing the acceptable window here, which is good

wetab73 · 2 September 2022 18:54

It’s been two weeks since I’ve been using halved values on the 10 III, without any problems and with not a single occurrence of closing any app due to OOM, with the single exception of the web browser, which happened once. So I’m more than satisfied.

jenix · 3 September 2022 06:39

My experience showed better results when halving the freemem values on my X10II. With the default settings, the Android App Support system gets killed most of the time after I watch a video in Fennec (Androids Firefox Browser), as soon as I stop using my device. Next time I turn on my screen, all Android apps are greyed out and opening one of them starts the Android App support first.
Since I started adjusting the freemem values, this rarely happened.
As I’m only using a few apps on my phone, this may not be the average user use case.

cartron · 30 September 2022 13:13

joining the boat here just tweaked minfree on my 10 II with 58580,70100,81620,93140,128245, I have 4 Android apps open + stock browser + Fernschreiber, and the system is still smooth, and no crash so far

JacekJagosz · 30 September 2022 16:49

I have posted a bug report for them to consider lowering those values

Vieno · 1 October 2022 11:52

So I just changed my default values after I really got sick with apps closing down randomly. Following @cartron’s tweak I changed from

[root@Xperia10II-DualSIM defaultuser]# cat /sys/modul
e/lowmemorykiller/parameters/minfree
117160,140200,163240,186280,256490

to

[defaultuser@Xperia10II-DualSIM ~]$ cat /sys/mod
ule/lowmemorykiller/parameters/minfree
58580,70100,81620,93140,128245

I will report back in the next couple of days whether I experience an improvement or not.

What I learned so far:

I have to set the limits after every reboot
Fennec can be killed like before

sanginteret · 4 October 2022 15:37

I have also modified the config on my 10 II.

Here is my experience:

Apps no longer close on their own.
Got 3 cashs in 2 days (0 in the last 6 months)

I am back to the default configuration.

nekron · 5 October 2022 14:23

I was hit by random OOM kills, too that made using the device (10 Mark 2) nearly impossible.
There where a few things I recognized:

SailfishOS browser pinch-to-zoom eats memory, e.g. open some github project source code file and zoom in. Now scroll a little bit inside that zoomed file and bang there you go (LMKD is killing a bunch of running applications in a blink)
I had a memory leak caused by faulty / broken Sailfish MTA that consumed a lot of memory but alas it’s a system process so other running non-system applications got killed first

My solution to the latter issue was to re-create my mail account which resolved the MTA system process memory leak that caused LMKD to hunt down my other non-system applications.

direc85 · 5 October 2022 14:36

Now that’s what I call “interesting”… How did you figure it out that it was the MTA process that had the memory leak? Asking for a friend

nekron · 5 October 2022 15:34

To be honest I had a bad feeling when syncing my mailbox (IMAP4) suddenly took very long and ended eventually with sync failures. After that I recognized that running multiple applications (Android: ntfy.sh, Schildichat; SFOS: Mail (backround), browser, Quickdit, forum viewer, Podqast) where killed overnight.

I didn’t dig any deeper nor analysed logs (which would be more objective). However after I fixed my broken mail account no overnight or common use crashes of running the same set of applications occured to me (knocking on wood).

What I wanted to say is that system processes are allowed higher memory demand before they are terminated so in the end faulty system processes can trigger the LMKD killing of unprivileged processes and you wonder why the heck are my applications crashing all the time.

direc85 · 7 October 2022 06:35

I updated to 4.4.0.72 and my changes to the /vendor/etc files was reverted. Just realized when I got pulseaudio killed today (or yesterday).

cartron · 7 October 2022 17:51

yes, this doesn’t survive a reboot.
I’m looking at options, it looks like using udevadm could be an option, i’ll try to find some time over the week-end to look at that, and will report back.

pawel.spoon · 17 October 2022 13:07

typo in your formula

it is *4 / 1024

JacekJagosz · 17 October 2022 13:28

You can edit this file, it will work till the next OS update. The numbers that direc posted last were the best I think, or values used by 10 II, both quite similar.

pawel.spoon · 17 October 2022 13:30

omg was to stupid to click on insert in vi

LOL

thanks

dumol · 2 November 2022 14:45

There’s place for improvement on the XA2 devices too… I’ve had more frequent crashes lately, seemingly related to RAM usage. Typically, my browser would be killed when starting a big Android app. Or the Android app would fail to start if there were too many apps open.

Here’s what helped on my XA2:

printf 768,1024,2048,4096 >/
sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/minfree

I’ve been using these settings for some weeks. Two other XA2 users have also tried them successfully. There still are OOM kills, but markedly fewer.

X0X0 · 9 November 2022 01:35

To recap, on Sony 10 Xperia III, we are changing the default value of “minfree” (which killer was that?) by:

[root@Xperia10III defaultuser]# nano /vendor/etc/init/init.lena.rc

167160,190200,213240,236280,356490

to be changed to:

65536,73728,90112,131072,196608

Save and Reboot.

A Reboot will reset the values to default. How to overcome that?

Do we change the values from here instead?

[root@Xperia10III defaultuser]# nano /vendor/etc/init/init.lena.rc

    # LMK tunning
    write /sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/enable_lmk 1
    write /sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/minfree "167160,190200,213240,236280,356490"
    write /sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/adj "0,58,147,529,1000"
    write /sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/vmpressure_file_min 105984
    write /sys/module/lowmemorykiller/parameters/oom_reaper 1

Yes indeed, survives a reboot.

Is this the only step or change that we need to perform, changing the values within ‘/vendor/etc/init/init.lena.rc’; or there is another step need to be taken?

Like

[root@Xperia10III defaultuser]# nano /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

And chang the value from 25 to 50?

Yet that resets back to value 25, after a reboot.

And regarding

Are these values, ‘15360,19200,23040,26880,34415,43737’ imply to Sony 10 Xperia III, or Sony 10 Xperia II ?

My Sony 10 Xperia III is in constant freeze and crash when I do have any Android app up, specifically OSMAnd android map app, or any mapping package, like Pure Maps.

This and for some reason only happens when I am outdoors, walking within the city.
Perhaps this RAM process of killing apps what is causing this, and with the GPS issues, networking [since I reside in the US, not all bands my phone can pickup]?

Thank you all for this wealth of information… One of the best forums to follow

JacekJagosz · 9 November 2022 21:28

Those are Xperia 10 II values that I suggested using on 10 III. Those are not that much lower than what 10 III is using, so should be pretty safe.
What direc suggested should bring bigger improvements though, 65536,73728,90112,131072,196608 as you even said in your post.