Understanding the Linux oom-killer's logs

Question

My app was killed by the oom-killer. It is Ubuntu 11.10 running on a live USB with no swap and the PC has 1 Gig of RAM. The only app running (other than all the built in U

Answer 1

Sum of total_vm is 847170 and sum of rss is 214726, these two values are counted in 4kB pages, which means when oom-killer was running, you had used 214726*4kB=858904kB physical memory and swap space.

Since your physical memory is 1GB and ~200MB was used for memory mapping, it's reasonable for invoking oom-killer when 858904kB was used.

rss for process 2603 is 181503, which means 181503*4KB=726012 rss, was equal to sum of anon-rss and file-rss.

[11686.043647] Killed process 2603 (flasherav) total-vm:1498536kB, anon-rss:721784kB, file-rss:4228kB