How to make OOM killer log into /var/log/messages when it kills any process?

Question

I use CentOS 7 with kernel 3.1.0

I know there is a hitman in Linux called oom killer which kills a process that uses too much memory out of available space.

I want to configure it to log the activities so that I can check whether it happens or not. How can I set it up?

Thanks,

Last I checked the OOM killer was not shy about spamming the system logs with logs... — thrig, Mar 28 '17 at 14:22

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

9

OOMkiller's activities are guaranteed to be in /var/log/dmesg (at least for a time). Usually the system logger daemon will also put it in /var/log/messages by default on most distributions with which I've worked.

These commands might be of help in tracking the logs down:

grep oom /var/log/*
grep total_vm /var/log/*

This answer has more details about parsing those log entries to see exactly what is going on.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

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answered Mar 28 '17 at 16:31

DopeGhoti

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Ran the above two commands and nothing appeared. But my java application was killed by OS. I am using centos server. – Al-Alamin Jun 25 '18 at 10:52
Yeah, CentOS doesn't seem to put it in `/var/log/dmesg` here either. And unfortunately I don't have access to `/var/log/messages` on this system to check that (owned/only accessible by root). – Izkata Jun 26 '19 at 17:57
Be careful with grep in those dirs it sometimes dies with `grep: memory exhausted` for me :) – rogerdpack Dec 14 '21 at 21:01

How to make OOM killer log into /var/log/messages when it kills any process?

1 Answers1