How Tech - Systems Programming

How Tech - Systems Programming

Memory Allocation Algorithms

Optimizing Under Heavy Load to Reduce OOM Kills

Apr 14, 2026
∙ Paid

Your service runs fine at 2 AM. By 9 AM, the OOM killer has shot it in the head. dmesg shows:

Out of memory: Kill process 18234 (your-app) score 847 or sacrifice child

The process was using 4 GB of RSS. You have 16 GB installed. Something is deeply wrong, and it’s probably not what you think.


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