On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 17:53 -0800, Gordon Messmer wrote: [...] > The feature that you're referring to is called "overcommit". I had > hoped that by referring to it *by name*, I could avoid inaccurate > corrections, but I guess not. > > Overcommit uses a heuristic algorithm to determine whether or not a > request to allocate more memory than is present (either by malloc or > fork) will be allowed. In many cases, fork() will fail if you do not > have enough memory for a second copy of the application, even though > Linux doesn't copy a complete set of pages during fork(). If you want > the system to work *reliably*, you must have enough free memory for a > second copy of your largest application. In most cases you should > achieve that by having at least as much swap as physical memory. I see. I simply hadn't noticed the overcommit factor. Thanks for the clarification. poc -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
