# earlyoom

23 Hacker News commenters recommended earlyoom and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free Linux daemon that kills memory-hungry processes before the system freezes, and works well out of the box. Critics say it does not fully fix memory problems and can kill too aggressively.

## Why people recommend it

- Kills apps before system freezes (6 comments): "software like earlyoom and similar, that basically tried to preempt oomkiller and kill something before it gets to sluggish state" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333235)) "After setting up earlyoom to gracefully start shutting stuff down at a threshold before hitting oom, robustly works all the time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49385646)) "run something like earlyoom to stop the system from reaching a low-RAM situation in the first place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953007))
- Works out of the box (2 comments): "Never had to touch the configuration, out of the box has been sufficient for me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49356799)) "They usually work out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345816))
- Configurable with prefer and avoid flags (3 comments): "earlyoom has been around a long time, and has an --avoid flag." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285958)) "EarlyOOM is pretty configurable, if you care to check it out." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459819)) "You can use `earlyoom --prefer firefox --avoid xlock`." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353229))
- Safety net alongside swap (3 comments): "Swap + zswap + earlyoom is a great safety need incase things get hairy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665328)) "I always either switch off swap on Linux machines or install EarlyOOM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49501543)) "I always install earlyoom for that reason" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655357))

## What people warn about

- Does not fully fix the problem (2 comments): "I've had a 'better' experience, but I guess it's not really fixed yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649237)) "From my experience it does not help much" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648873))
- Kills processes too aggressively (2 comments): "I could not find the right balance between unexpected OOM kills and missing the brownouts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502410)) "it's too aggressive. It kills stuff too quickly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285962))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [systemd-oomd](https://hackerapproved.com/p/systemd-oomd.md): 13 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "earlyoom", https://hackerapproved.com/p/earlyoom/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).