Linux – Releasing swap space

OOM doesn't necessarily kill the process you think it will. Read about it here: http://lwn.net/Articles/317814/

I suspect what is happening is that because chrome uses a different process for each page, it's confusing the OOM-killer's heuristics and other processes are being killed rather than the parent chrome process.

According to this, the OOM-killer likes to kill niced processes. So try setting chrome to a niceness of greater than 0.. might make it more of a target :-)

It is possible that multiple programs will be using the same swap area, so it will be reported twice.

There is no need to try to tell Linux to use the buffered area instead of swap--it's already very smart about what it's doing. If you're using 9gb of swap and 9gb of buffer, that's a good thing... that means Linux realizes that 9gb of stuff loaded into memory isn't being used actively, so it's more efficient to swap it to disk so that your buffer can grow larger, and improve your performance.

EDIT: If you add up all of the memory used by each process, you'll get much more than your physical RAM, too. This is due to shared libraries being used by multiple programs, as well as the way Linux handles forks--it doesn't duplicate the entire program in memory, it only duplicates the portions that differ between the two instances. In some cases, video memory can be shown as part of an X process--I think the old Voodoo3 cards did this. There may be other cases where "phantom" memory can show up in top, as well.