rfjakob/earlyoom

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4241 stars · 207 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

earlyoom is a small daemon written in pure C that monitors available memory and free swap on Linux and kills the largest process when both drop below a configurable threshold. It prevents the system from becoming unresponsive by acting earlier than the in-kernel OOM killer.

Use cases

• prevent my linux desktop from freezing when memory runs out
• kill the biggest process before the system hangs due to low memory
• avoid waiting for the kernel oom-killer on an unresponsive machine
• monitor available memory and swap and act automatically
• protect a headless server from memory exhaustion
• configure a memory pressure threshold for process termination

When to choose

• you run Linux and experience system freezes from memory exhaustion
• you want a tiny, dependency-free daemon with simple configuration
• you need predictable early intervention before the kernel OOM killer triggers

When to avoid

• you need richer configuration and features (consider nohang)
• you are not on Linux
• you want per-cgroup or container-aware memory management

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

monitoring developer-tools operating-systems developer-tools performance cli oom-killer memory-management daemon system-administration c linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rfjakob/earlyoom")