Ubuntu 16.04 LTS – OOM killer terminates critical services

📖 ~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

Important processes are killed under memory stress, causing outages and data loss risk.

Environment & Reproduction

Appears under memory leaks, undersized hosts, or disabled swap conditions.

Root Cause Analysis

Kernel OOM logic terminates selected processes when reclaim cannot satisfy demand.

Quick Triage

Identify killed processes and memory trends around incident timestamps.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Correlate cgroup limits, RSS growth, and kernel OOM logs for true source.

Solution – Primary Fix

Stabilize memory usage, right-size limits, and add swap or capacity where required.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Apply process-level caps and restart policy tuning to reduce blast radius.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

No further OOM kills occur during peak loads and service SLOs remain stable.

Rollback Plan

Rollback memory limit changes if they induce new bottlenecks or instability.

Prevention & Hardening

Adopt memory observability and capacity forecasting for high-risk workloads.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Out of memory kill process and cgroup memory limit exceeded messages are relevant.

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

Review Linux OOM behavior and Ubuntu service memory management guidance.