📖 ~1 min read
Table of contents
Symptom & Impact
Database is abruptly killed under memory pressure, causing connection failures and transaction disruption.
Environment & Reproduction
Triggered by traffic spikes, memory mis-sizing, and absent cgroup limits on Ubuntu 18.04 hosts.
Root Cause Analysis
System exhausts available memory and kernel OOM policy selects database process as highest-impact victim.
Quick Triage
Confirm OOM evidence in kernel logs and reduce incoming load while stabilizing memory headroom.
Step-by-Step Diagnosis
Review memory usage trends, swap behavior, and per-process resident set growth patterns.
Solution – Primary Fix
Tune database buffers, enforce service memory limits, and add swap or capacity according to workload.
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Solution – Alternative Approaches
Use connection pooling, sharding, or failover to read replicas during peak pressure periods.
Verification & Acceptance Criteria
No further OOM kills during stress windows and database latency remains within SLA thresholds.
Rollback Plan
Revert aggressive memory caps if throughput drops below acceptable operational baselines.
Prevention & Hardening
Implement memory budget policy per service and monitor early warning indicators for saturation.
Related Errors & Cross-Refs
Relate to swap thrashing and high CPU cascade; include linked Ubuntu performance tutorial.
Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
View all Ubuntu 18.04 LTS tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →
Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.
References & Further Reading
Read Linux memory management docs, database tuning manuals, and Ubuntu capacity planning guides.
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