On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Paul Jakma wrote:
> another question, forgive me if it's stupid: Why do we even allow
> overcommited memory? What reason is there is to support app's that
> malloc() a huge amount of memory without using that memory?
[snip]
This isn't the only case. Linux uses COW paging on fork. I.e. if an app
forks, it doesn't get a seperate copy of pages until it writes to them.
This is a termendous speed increase (no copies until needed, cache, etc)
and quite a bit of memory savings, but you lose this memory saving if you
turn off overcommit.
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