> On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, david@lang.hm wrote:
>> if memory overcommit is disabled, the kernel checks to see if you
>> have an extra 1G of ram available, if you do it allows the process
>> to continue, if you don't it tries to free memory (by throwing away
>> cache, swapping to disk, etc), and if it can't free the memory will
>> return a memroy allocation error (which I believe will cause
>> firefox to exit).
>
> Remember that the memory overcommit check is checking against the
> amount of RAM + swap you have - not just the amount of RAM. When a
> fork occurs, hardly any extra actual RAM is used (due to copy on
> write), but the potential is there for the process to use it. If
> overcommit is switched off, then you just need to make sure there is
> *plenty* of swap to convince the kernel that it can actually fulfil
> all of the memory requests if all the processes behave badly and all
> shared pages become unshared. Then the consequences of processes
> actually using that memory are that the machine will swap, rather
> than the OOM killer having to act.
>
> Of course, it's generally bad to run a machine with more going on
> than will fit in RAM.
>
> Neither swapping nor OOM killing are particularly good - it's just a
> consequence of the amount of memory needed being unpredictable.
>
> Probably the best solution is to just tell the kernel somehow to
> never kill the postmaster.
Or configure adequate swap space?
Cheers,
Steve
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