What does syslog entry Memory pressure relief indicate

Question

My syslog file is has large number almost continuous entries as follows.

Apr 13 11:49:40 nrao-XPS-8700 gnome-session[2439]: Memory pressure relief: Total: res = 9682944/9682944/0, res+swap = 0/0/0
Apr 13 11:50:05 nrao-XPS-8700 gnome-session[2439]: Memory pressure relief: Total: res = 12369920/12369920/0, res+swap = 0/0/0
Apr 13 11:50:07 nrao-XPS-8700 gnome-session[2439]: Memory pressure relief: Total: res = 10633216/10690560/57344, res+swap = 0/0/0
Apr 13 11:50:10 nrao-XPS-8700 gnome-session[2439]: Memory pressure relief: Total: res = 9682944/11800576/2117632, res+swap = 0/0/0
Apr 13 11:50:35 nrao-XPS-8700 gnome-session[2439]: Memory pressure relief: Total: res = 12369920/12369920/0, res+swap = 0/0/0

Output of free -m command is follows

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   

available
Mem:          15998        7155        5903         113        2939        8323
Swap:         18477        4182       14295

Solution 1

Well, looks like you ran out of available physical memory. adding swap would not help unless another process can be swapped out to make enough physical memory available.

Solution 2

I see the message being generated by liferea. It is being generated from webkit.

A comment in the webkit bugzilla shows the same message being logged https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165533.

14:40:36.224304 -0800   Safari  Memory pressure relief: Total: res = 45481984/44896256/-585728, res+swap =  46080000/45494272/-585728

In the Webkit source MemoryPressureHandler::releaseMemory, a log message is generated with the 'Total' prefix.