On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Matthew Wakeling wrote:
On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, david@xxxxxxx 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.
if you are correct that it just checks against memory+swap then it's not a
big deal, but I don't think it does that. I think it actually allocates
the memory, and if it does that it will push things out of ram to do the
allocation, I don't believe that it will allocate swap space directly.
David Lang
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.
Matthew
