> > Yuck. That's a complete abomination. What's the point of it? It's turning
> 
> Paging Terry Lambert, Terry Lambert - do you read me?  It's time for
> your annual rant on the topic of memory overcommit. :-)

It's not overcommit so much as it is what happens to a process that gets a
page fault when there are no available pages to 'fix up' the overcommit.

AIX began overcommitting at one point but would kill -9 any process that
page faulted when there were no available pages. AIX sysadmins universally
hated this behavior and allocated HUGE swap files to avoid it.

I assume FreeBSD does something more reasonable.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com