In just over a week it will be two months since Canonical will throw Ubuntu 22.04. Among its novelties, it was highlighted that the performance was better than in previous versions, something that most of us relate to the jump from GNOME 40 to GNOME 42, but the company led by Mark Shuttleworth did something else. It enabled systemd-oomd by default, which is a helper to manage memory, but not everything is going as expected, or at least not for everyone.
What this assistant or daemon does is kill processes that are running in the background when the RAM memory is being pressed, that is, when there is a lot of consumption of this type of memory. The problem is that there are users who say that this is causing the user experience when working with Ubuntu 22.04 to be diminished. Specifically, there are applications that are closing unexpectedly when it's not what you want.
Ubuntu 22.04 developers discuss how to improve OOMD management
RAM is there to be used, it has always been said. In fact, the more you have the more it seems to consume, up to a point. What happens is that, when the limit is being reached, the system can have problems. To avoid this, systemd-oomd should kill processes that are running in the background and are not needed, but the problem is that the users say that applications like Chrome are closed. A browser is not launched to close as soon as we are careless, and having it close while we are working with it is a big problem.
Also, those who are reporting this bug say that many times when Chrome is closed, does it without much RAM being used, which is clearly an erratic behavior of this function. Without having the data on the table, one would think that the system kills right and left if there is a high peak in consumption, and that is not how it should work.
Ubuntu Developers they are already working to see what is happening and to improve the management of this daemon or helper. The first thing they have thought of is raising the SwapUsedLimit so that it selects better in its ManagedOOMSwap and never kills the swap. There is also the remote possibility that they will increase the size of Ubuntu's swap.
The point is that Ubuntu 22.04 should have improved something, and it seems that trying to do so has broken other things for some users. More information in this writing by Nick Rossbrook.