An administrator is troubleshooting a database service outage that was reported by a monitoring system. Given the following output: Which of the following is the reason for the outage?

Question

Options

• AThe administrator sent a kill signal to the database
• BThe server is missing the DMA bus
• CThe database cannot write anything else to the storage
• DThe server does not have enough physical memory

• A
  4% (1)
• B
  9% (2)
• C
  13% (3)
• D
  74% (17)

Explanation

The output (typically from dmesg or /var/log/syslog) shows the Linux OOM (Out of Memory) killer was invoked due to insufficient physical memory. When the system cannot allocate enough RAM and swap is also exhausted, the kernel's OOM killer selects and terminates processes - often the one consuming the most memory, which in this case is the database service. Option A is incorrect because the kill came from the kernel's OOM killer, not an administrator. Option B (missing DMA bus) is a hardware issue unrelated to this scenario. Option C (storage write failure) would produce disk I/O errors, not OOM messages. The log output's oom_kill_process or 'kill process' entries confirm a memory exhaustion cause.

No community discussion yet for this question.