From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2007 08:48:07 +0000 From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <942dnRSq2J0FUEHbnZ2dnUVZ_v2unZ2d@comcast.com> References: <13426df10709021847o1df19364j2d22a87d425c6505@mail.gmail.com>, Subject: Re: [9fans] plan 9 overcommits memory? Topicbox-Message-UUID: b7699622-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 "erik quanstrom" wrote in message news:d81b7ef468d08ecf9e31985f92a9b0c4@quanstro.net... > but why introduce unpredictability? who really programs as if > memory is not overcommited? Practically everybody. > i would bet that acme and most > residents of /sys/src/cmd could do quite bad things to you in these > cases. there's no waserror() in userland to wrap around memset. You don't have to do that if malloc takes are of it. (See my nearby posting.) > how much memory can be wasted by assuming that all brk'ed memory > can be used? If you allocate the storage, presumably you should expect to use it. Anyway, it's better to be wasteful and correct than randomly failing.