RE: Kernel doesn't free Cached Memory

["Al Boldi" <a1426z@gawab.com>]

Dick Johnson wrote: { 
> On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 08:27 -0300, Vinicius wrote:
> [...]
>>    I have a server with 2 Pentium 4 HT processors and 32 GB of RAM, 
>> this server runs lots of applications that consume lots of memory to. 
>> When I stop this applications, the kernel doesn't free memory (the  
>> memory still in use) and the server cache lots of memory (~27GB). 
>> When I start this applications, the kernel sends  "Out of Memory" 
>> messages and kill some random applications.

...you might even need to turn memory over-commit off:
  echo "0" > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
}

That's in 2.4. In 2.6 it's:
  echo "2" > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

But the kernel doesn't honor no-overcommit in either version, i.e. it still
overcommits/pages-out loaded/running procs, thus invoking OOM!

Is there a way to make the kernel strictly honor the no-overcommit request?

Thanks!