earlyoom actually works best with only zram. If you have a disk-based swap partition, your system is likely to become frozen and unusable before earlyoom gets a chance to save you.
On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 4:16 pm, Przemek Klosowski via devel devel@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
This is weird---your swap was 100% full, and ram almost full, and yet killing 4GB VirtualBox didn't seem to free up memory. I suspect some sort of measurement or reporting error---if these numbers were accurate, EarlyOOM did have a reason to panic and kill zoom. BTW, zoom taking 721 MiB is crazy.
I've seen this before actually. I think it's just a bug. Maybe earlyoom doesn't allow enough time after killing to see how the kill affects system memory use. It should always kill the real memory hog first, but it might instead get confused and start killing a bunch of other unproblematic processes before it realizes that system memory use is back under control.