Process Exhaustion Attacks: Troubleshooting OOM Killed pods

Modified on Thu, 23 May at 2:34 PM

When performing a Process Exhaustion attack against a given pod, depending on the provisioned resources for a container it may run out of memory and the pod's main process will be oom-killed.


When a process exhaustion attack occurs, the gremlin process has an adjusted oom_score to prevent it being oom-killed, as this can create a state where the zombie processes created during a given experiment are not properly cleaned up.  It is preferable for the primary container process to be oom-killed than for the gremlin process get oom-killed and leave hanging processes behind that will ultimately deprive the container of resources. 

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