Re: Setting oom_adj on linux?

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
>> * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
>>> I don't want to go to the trouble of creating (and documenting) a
>>> configure option for this.  Much less a GUC ;-)
>
>> Requiring a custom build to disable it would be horrible, in my view.
>> Or, at best, just means that the packagers won't enable it, which
>> obviously would be less than ideal.
>
> I'm a packager, and I think that this approach is perfectly fine.
> The place where the rubber meets the road is in the init script,
> which is the packager's responsibility.  If the packager is going
> to provide an init script that sets oom_adj in the first place,
> he can turn on the compensation code inside the binary.  If not,
> the compensation code has no purpose anyhow.  There are no moving
> parts in this as far as the end user is concerned.

There could well be moving parts if the user wants to adjust the value
being written to oom_adj, and can't because it's compiled in.  I don't
see why we can't just add a GUC for this and be done with it.

...Robert