Grep Killed My Server
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Grep Killed My Server
A talk by Kevin Dankwardt, Ph.D.
Date: October 14, 2025, 6:00 doors open, 6:00-6:30 Arrivals/Happy Hour. 6:30- ~7:15 Lecture, ~7:15-~8:00 Networking Talk
Location: Sentry, San Francisco (address given to sign-ups)
When a customer support engineer crashed a customer's server with an Out Of Memory from grep, and I was the manager for the Linux kernel team, it got handed to me, and, thus it got me thinking.
How can Grep cause an OOM? How can an OOM cause a panic? What could be done to prevent this in the future? How does Grep manage memory? What about alternatives like the Silver Seeker?
Kevin Dankwardt talks through these questions and thus gives a tour through Linux user space and kernel space memory management and adds tangential topics like Linux control groups, kernel configuration, and swapping.
These are Linux fundamentals of interest to any Linux user.
Grep Killed My Server