Re: Memory overcommitting (was Re: http://www.redhat.com/redhat/)

John Wyszynski (wyszynsk@clark.net)
Thu, 20 Feb 1997 05:41:44 -0500


While the whole chain has been somewhat interesting, I still believe that
for a production environment, this is SUICIDE.

(1) For the situation where large processes fork and immediately exec,
many other *IX system have a "vfork" system call to handle the situation.

(2) The claims that statically that this is okay 99.9% is hogwash. The
airline industry may sell tickets that way, but they don't want their
computers doing it. I've been in line when it has happened to them and
its not a pretty site.

(3) This is sure a time waster for porting and developing programs to run
on Linux. "Hey, you know that program that worked fine on System A could
blow up on Linux." This is espcially true for those people who want
to move binaries from some other vendor's OS.

John Wyszynski