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Looking at journal -xe for the reason(s) a process is killed, the message comes up in red "Out of memory: Killed process..." but it doesn't say whether the limiting resource is virtual memory or is real memory.

Which does it mean and why doesn't it simply say so?

James Bowery
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  • A nice slightly above entry level write up on the causes of an out of memory error and the OoM killer triggering is this: https://linux-mm.org/OOM - in short you only get one error because for the kernel the problem is always the same root issue: it can’t free up enough real memory to run all requested tasks. That can coincide with full swap but doesn’t have to be. – Bob Jan 16 '21 at 18:48
  • That's a reasonable answer to my two 'and' conjoined questions. – James Bowery Jan 16 '21 at 20:22

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The simply answer is, at the moment your memory usage (RAM) is high and make other proccess cant run.

If your server run on VMs virtualization like KVM etc then it mean virtual memory.

YonzLeon
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  • Virtual memory in this context does not mean a hypervisor and virtual hardware. It means abstracted address spaces that do not necessarily directly map to the contents of DRAM chips. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory – John Mahowald Jan 16 '21 at 20:05