PostgreSQL and the OOM Killer: Why You Must Use Strict Memory Overcommit
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The authors discuss the importance of strict memory overcommit settings in PostgreSQL to prevent catastrophic OOM (out of memory) kills. They share their experience with kernel bugs and provide a heuristic for managing memory limits in database services.
Why it matters
Proper memory management is critical for the stability and reliability of large-scale database infrastructure.
Our team members built and operated five managed PostgreSQL services over the past 15 years. Across all of them, one configuration has remained constant: strict memory overcommit. In this blog post, we will explain how strict memory overcommit protects your database from catastrophic OOM (out of memory) kills. We will also share how a three-character kernel bug forced us to temporarily disable this setting. Finally, we will explain our heuristic for determining the right memory overcommit limit. Hopefully, this will help you find the right setting for your workloads.
The content is a technical guide for database administrators with no political or social bias.
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