[linux] Finding which process was killed by Linux OOM killer

When Linux runs out of memory (OOM), the OOM killer chooses a process to kill based on some heuristics (it's an interesting read: http://lwn.net/Articles/317814/).

How can one programmatically determine which processes have recently been killed by the OOM killer?

Now dstat provides the feature to find out in your running system which process is candidate for getting killed by oom mechanism

dstat --top-oom
 --out-of-memory---
  kill score
 java           77
 java           77
 java           77

and as per man page

  --top-oom
          show process that will be killed by OOM the first

Try this so you don't need to worry about where your logs are:

dmesg -T | egrep -i 'killed process'

-T - readable timestamps

Try this out:

grep "Killed process" /var/log/syslog