7 ms·

Hint: disable or minimize overcommit and you're good to go.

• justsomehnguy 5y ago
  That works for the systems I control. Most of the time I encounter OOM shenanigans on the systems which aren't mine.
• rrss 5y ago
  I dearly wish overcommit could be disabled per-cgroup, but AFAIK this is not possible. malloc failing seems like a much simpler indication of memory pressure than the alternatives like PSI.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    AIUI, you can always use plain old ulimit to restrict virtual memory usage per-process, which has the same outcome as disabling overcommit.
    • rrss 5y ago
      yeah, for a single process. but I’m mostly interested in doing this for a process tree (like a browser), and I don’t think this would work well in that case, since the limit would apply to each process individually. this would work if there was a cgroup virtual address space controller, but I think those have been proposed but never merged.
• kasabali 5y ago
  In my short experience you can't disable overcommit if you're using Linux on desktop because programs using gtk/glib freak out when they can't malloc.