oom killer and its superior braindamage in 2.4

[Marc-Christian Petersen <m.c.p@wolk-project.de>]

Hi all,

I just thought (ok it was yesterday) about stress testing my mysql db.
I used this:
- mystress.pl localhost mysql root test 600 300 60 "select * from user"

It worked like a charme. So I tried:
- mystress.pl localhost mysql root test 1800 900 60 "select * from user"

My machine has 512MB RAM and 512MB SWAP.

I expected that the 2nd run will OOM my machine but I did not expect this 
silly behaviour.

The following log entry appeared only _once_ (there were ~700 mysqld running)

- Feb 21 10:03:22 codeman kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 1463 (mysqld).


Instead of really killing either mysqld or mystress.pl the OOM killer decided 
to kill apache (apache did nothing but had 5 threads sleeping)

- Feb 21 10:04:57 codeman kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 2657 (apache).

The above log entry (apache) appeared for about 4 hours every some seconds 
(same PID) until I thought about sysrq-b to get out of this braindead 
behaviour. The machine was somewhat dead for me because I was not able to do 
anything but sysrq. The system itself was _not_ dead, there was massive disk 
i/o. This is 2.4.20 vanilla.

Is there any chance we can fix this up?

ciao, Marc