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Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 17:45:59 +0100
From: Alan Jenkins <aj504@student.cs.york.ac.uk>
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To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
CC: Alan Jenkins <aj504@cs.york.ac.uk>, Chris Frey <cdfrey@foursquare.net>,
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Subject: Re: OOM policy, overcommit control, and soft limits
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Alan Cox wrote:
>> In other words, I reckon I have on the order of a gigabyte of virtual
>> address space, which has been malloc'ed or equivalent, but is not used
>> and therefore requires no memory resource (ram or swap).
>>     
>
> No need to reckon. The committed_as in the proc file should give a rough
> value.
>
> Alan
>   
Thanks for the education.  I shall read up on the other numbers in 
/proc/meminfo as well.

In that case I was overly pessimistic.  I was only committed around the 
512M mark.  It jumps up to 750M if I open Amarok and Firefox though.  At 
times I've run more - I would guess I can contrive combinations which go 
above 1000M.


I've not had an OOM event on this machine.  I have had runaway 
development-related loads, causing thrashing (hitting swap) out of 
control, but I can't really comment.  I don't remember what caused it 
exactly.  Plus I'm swapping to a Flash drive; a Flash specific IO 
scheduler might have coped better (than noop) and made it easier to recover.

Alan