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Linux Memory Overcommit (2007)
Last week I learned something very interesting about the way Linux allocates and manages memory by default out of the box. In a way, Linux a...
In an extremely low memory condition, the kernel will start firing off the "OOM Killer" routine. I found that linux can be brought more in line with traditional/expected memory management by setting the sysctls: (Apparently these are available only 2.6 kernels) When I set this to 100 on a 8GB system, I was able to malloc() about 7.5G of stuff, which seemed about right since I had normal multi-user processes running and no swap configured.
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