* Andrew Sullivan: > You _want_ the fork to fail when the kernel can't (over)commit the > memory, because otherwise the stupid genius kernel will come along > and maybe blip your postmaster on the head, causing it to die by > surprise. The other side of the story is that with overcommit, the machine continues to work flawlessly in some loads, when it would fail without overcommit. It's also not clear that trading a segfault for malloc returning a null pointer leads to more deterministic failures (because the malloc failure does not necessarily occur in the memory hog). My personal experience is that vm.overcommit_memory=2 (together with tons of swap space) leads to more deterministic failure behavior, but we don't use much software that aggressively allocates address space without actually using it (Sun's JVM does in some cases, and SBCL is particularly obnoxious in this regard). -- Florian Weimer <fweimer@xxxxxx> BFK edv-consulting GmbH http://www.bfk.de/ Kriegsstraße 100 tel: +49-721-96201-1 D-76133 Karlsruhe fax: +49-721-96201-99 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
