Started debugging an issue where Linux started calling OOM reaper despite tons of memory is used as Linux cached pages. My assumption was if there is a memory pressure, cache should shrink and leave way for the application to use. This is the documented and expected behavior. OOM reaper is called when few number of times page allocation has failed consequently. If for example mysql wants to grow its buffer and it asks for a page allocation and if the page allocation fails repeatedly, kernel invokes oom reaper. OOM reaper won't move out pages, it sleeps for some time and sees if kswapd or a program has freed up caches/application pages. If not it will start doing the dirty job of killing applications and freeing up memory. In our mysql setup, mysql is the application using most of the Used Memory, so no other application can free up memory for mysql to use. Cached pages are stored as 2 lists in Linux kernel viz active and inactive. More details here https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorma...