Ubuntu 22.04 comes with the systemd-oomd service enabled by default, which has been "helpfully" killing my IDE and / or terminals whenever I try to compile an application using an abundance of threads / memory.

What is the right way to either turn this off, or configure the service to not shoot random processes in the face while I'm using them?

I'm aware that I can mitigate this behavior in a few ways; e.g. by increasing the size of the swap space, but this is still not a panacea since:

• The OOM daemon kills the entire process tree, so even the terminal hosting the processes that were killed will suddenly vanish;

  
  



• The OOM daemon kills the process tree without providing any notification to the user, so all the user knows is that their terminal / IDE / application hosting memory-hungry processes has suddenly vanished.

  
  

A user could find out what happened post-hoc via journalctl or something similar if they knew what to look for, but I don't think the average Ubuntu desktop user would think to do this.

As an example, normally when a process crashes via a deadly signal or similar, a crash reporter will tell the user that something went wrong. Shouldn't there be a similar facility for processes killed by the OOM daemon?

Edited to add requested output re: swap space; as far as I know these are just the defaults that were set when Ubuntu 22.04 was installed.

$ free -h

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available

Mem:            31Gi       5.2Gi       3.1Gi       210Mi        23Gi        25Gi

Swap:          2.0Gi       0.0Ki       2.0Gi



$ sysctl vm.swappiness

vm.swappiness = 60



$ swapon -s

Filename                Type        Size        Used        Priority

/swapfile                               file        2097148     792     -2