* Jim C. Nasby: > What's interesting is that apparently FreeBSD also has overcommit (and > IIRC no way to disable it), yet I never hear people going off on OOM > kills in FreeBSD. My theory is that FreeBSD admins are smart enough to > dedicate a decent amount of swap space, so that by the time you got to > an OOM kill situation you'd be so far into swapping that the box would > be nearly unusable. I've seen OOM situations with our regular "use twice as much swap space as there is RAM in the machine" rule. Perhaps Linux is just paging too fast for this to work. 8-P By the way, the sysctl setting breaks some applications and programming environments, such as SBCL and CMUCL.