Comment by IshKebab
11 days ago
> Most systems these days have over commit
Sure if you ignore the most popular desktop OS in the world.
Also overcommit (at least how Linux does it) is dumb. It leads to broken OOM behaviour (killing a totally random process, or more often locking up the system and hard rebooting). And some apps do need to handle OOM properly, e.g. formal verification systems which can use enormous amounts of memory. Jasper has to resort to monitoring page fault stats to know when it is using too much memory.
> It leads to broken OOM behaviour
no it doesn't. the broken oom behavior is distros not configuring earlyoom/systemd-oom properly. The problem here is that the kernel doesn't know what software is critical to your OS so the distro needs to be responsible for what processes to protect.
For apps that need to handle oom, Linux is missing something a handle to tell apps to shrink their memory use. Apple does this and it seems to work quite well (and proves that Linux style overcommit works well since it's what they use)