Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Swap Exhaustion Triggers OOM Kills

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Critical daemons are killed unexpectedly, producing downtime and transaction loss.

Environment & Reproduction

Reproduces during memory spikes on undersized Ubuntu 16.04 systems with heavy workloads.

Root Cause Analysis

Physical memory and swap are exhausted, forcing kernel OOM selection based on scoring heuristics.

Quick Triage

Check free memory, swap usage, and recent oom-killer logs before restarting services.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Profile top memory consumers, inspect cgroup limits, and correlate spikes with workload events.

Solution – Primary Fix

Tune memory limits, increase swap appropriately, optimize workload usage, and restart in controlled sequence.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Scale vertically or distribute workloads to reduce single-host memory pressure.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

No new OOM events appear during peak load and service latency remains within SLO.

Rollback Plan

Revert memory tuning changes if they cause unacceptable performance side effects.

Prevention & Hardening

Implement memory alerts and enforce per-service limits in orchestration standards.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

See also swap thrashing, high iowait symptoms, and JVM heap misconfiguration patterns.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

View all Ubuntu 16.04 LTS tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

Refer to Linux kernel memory management and OOM troubleshooting resources.