[olug] anyone having trouble with recent Linuxes on 32-bit servers?

[Lou Duchez]

About a month ago, I installed updates to Fedora 24 on a variety of 
servers, and the 64-bit servers were all fine, but the 32-bit servers 
suddenly started having memory issues.  Like, the servers would crash 
under load (such as when copying lots of files in a backuip), the 
oom-killer would get invoked frequently, and so on. Anyone else 
experience the like?  Does anyone have recommendations?

One thing I did to mitigate the problem somewhat, though not solve it, 
was to make use of nice and ionice.  "nice" manages the CPU priority of 
a task, and "ionice" manages the I/O priority of a task; between the two 
of them, you can instruct Linux to run a task at low CPU and I/O 
priority.  This helped with some of the tasks that were causing trouble, 
such as backup processes.

To run a command as low priority, it is:

/usr/bin/nice -n19 /usr/bin/ionice -c2 -n7 [your command here]

And yes you can turn that into a handy little script, so you can simply 
run "[script name] [your command here]":

---

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/nice -n19 /usr/bin/ionice -c2 -n7 $*