[Lxc-users] Host crash after oom killer in a container...

[Gordon Henderson]

I've noticed a few oddities recently which has resulted in me needing to 
reboot (and in once case power cycle) a server which isn't good...

I've recently start to set the memoy linits - e.g.

lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes       = 1024M
lxc.cgroup.memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes = 1024M

That, as I understand it will limit a container to 1024M of RAM and 1024M 
of RAM+SWAP - ie. it should prevent using swap at all...

The issues come when a container exceeds that and the oom killer comes in 
- which seems to do what it's supposed to do, but after that some real 
oddities start to happen. The process table expands and lots and lots of 
processes sit in a D state waiting on something. Load average gets to over 
300. What's worse is that doing some operations on the host server seem to 
stall to - e.g. "ps ax" - it listed a few 100 processes then stalled!

LXC is 0.7.2 (Debian Stable/Squeeze)
Kernel is 2.6.35.13

I've noticed it in 2 different servers now - one a dual-core Intel, the 
other a quad core AMD - both running Debian Squeeze and the same 2.6.35.13 
kernel custom compiled for the underlying hardware.

I have the kernel log-files avalable if anyone wants them, but I'm really 
intersted to know if I'm missing anything obvious - wrong paramters, or 
just expecting too much - known issues here - should I use a different 
kernel and so on...

Thanks,

Gordon