Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 20 Mar 2000 01:41:56 -0800 (PST) | From | David Whysong <> | Subject | Re: Overcommitable Memory... |
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On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Helge Hafting wrote:
>You don't understand overcommitting. The problem is that some >techniques, particularly fork() tries to allocate much more memory than >it will ever need. So preventing fork() when there isn't memory to back >it will severely restrict the number of processes you may run, or force >you to install many gigabytes of swap that won't ever be used. This >would effectively make linux unusable for some tasks on small machines. >(I.e. hobbyist machines and those money-saving old machines corporations >use with linux) You can run your machine that way though, take a look >at /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
But "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory" does not prevent memory overcommit in a global sense, it just prevents any one program from using more VM than is currently free. Since memory is still not allocated until pages are touched, you can still be heavily overcommitted.
Dave
David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara My public PGP keys are on my web page - http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~dwhysong DSS PGP Key 0x903F5BD6 : FE78 91FE 4508 106F 7C88 1706 B792 6995 903F 5BD6 D-H PGP key 0x5DAB0F91 : BC33 0F36 FCCD E72C 441F 663A 72ED 7FB7 5DAB 0F91
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