Why the system keeps crashing even with enough caches in memory?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • System crashes by invoking oom-killer as soon as the system started
  • From the vmcore, it had 2.4GB of memory in CACHED which is supposed to be reclaimed instead of trigger oom-killer
                 PAGES        TOTAL      PERCENTAGE
    TOTAL MEM  4083554      15.6 GB         ----
         FREE    21054      82.2 MB    0% of TOTAL MEM
         USED  4062500      15.5 GB   99% of TOTAL MEM
       SHARED   633535       2.4 GB   15% of TOTAL MEM
      BUFFERS    15939      62.3 MB    0% of TOTAL MEM
       CACHED   628183       2.4 GB   15% of TOTAL MEM         
                                                   ^
                                                   +--- Caches that supposed to be reclaimed

         SLAB    42289     165.2 MB    1% of TOTAL MEM

   TOTAL SWAP  4718590        18 GB         ----
    SWAP USED     1361       5.3 MB    0% of TOTAL SWAP
    SWAP FREE  4717229        18 GB   99% of TOTAL SWAP

 COMMIT LIMIT  5224367      19.9 GB         ----
    COMMITTED   479356       1.8 GB    9% of TOTAL LIMIT

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

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