Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> Charles Forsyth wrote:
> 
>>
>> Linux apparently takes the Atlas approach and thrashes on demand.
>>
> 
> until it starts killing random processes. Usually the wrong one. But,
> hey, heuristics, right?

Maybe you already know, but by change I got into the linux malloc(3)
manpage, and I found its BUGS section:


BUGS
       By default, Linux follows an  optimistic  memory  allocation
strategy.
       This  means  that  when malloc() returns non-NULL there is no
guarantee
       that the memory really is available. This is a really bad bug.
In case
       it  turns  out  that the system is out of memory, one or more
processes
       will be killed by the infamous OOM killer.  In case Linux  is
employed
       under  circumstances  where it would be less desirable to
suddenly lose
       some randomly picked processes, and moreover the kernel version
is suf-
       ficiently recent, one can switch off this overcommitting behavior
using
       a command like
              # echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory