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Out of memory and vm.swappiness setting on RHEL

Troubleshooting


Problem

When kernel parameter setting for vm.swappiness is 0, the swappiness value may affect OOM killer behaviour on certain RHEL versions.

Symptom

Occasionally, you may find Db2 database server process (db2sysc) is killed by the Linux OOM killer.
For example, the following message can be found in OS log /var/log/messages:
Dec  1 01:00:00 host1 kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 12345 (db2sysc) score 157 or sacrifice child

Document Location

Worldwide

[{"Line of Business":{"code":"LOB10","label":"Data and AI"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU058","label":"IBM Infrastructure w\/TPS"},"Product":{"code":"SSEPGG","label":"Db2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows"},"ARM Category":[{"code":"a8m500000008PmEAAU","label":"Operating System or Hardware-\u003EMemory Management"}],"ARM Case Number":"TS004635283","Platform":[{"code":"PF016","label":"Linux"}],"Version":"All Version(s)"}]

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Document Information

Modified date:
01 May 2025

UID

ibm16390946