Use of almost 9 GB of memory causing to be terminated by Linux OOM killer
On system with 16 GB and running Debian Sid/unstable with Linux 5.7.6, and GNOME Shell 3.36.4, the Linux out of memory (OOM) killer, killed the process gnome-shell, using
[308488.687832] Renderer: page allocation failure: order:0, mode:0x104cd2(GFP_HIGHUSER|__GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL|__GFP_RECLAIMABLE), nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0
[…]
[308488.691608] [ 72917] 5272 72917 2225059 321225 8712192 0 0 gnome-shell
[…]
[308488.691761] oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-5272.slice/user@5272.service,task=gnome-shell,pid=72917,uid=5272
[308488.691806] Out of memory: Killed process 72917 (gnome-shell) total-vm:8900236kB, anon-rss:486944kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:797956kB, UID:5272 pgtables:8508kB oom_score_adj:0
If I interpret the last line correctly, the gnome-shell total-vm size increased from 2225059 kB to 8900236 kB. Is that possible?