[OpenWrt-Devel] overcommit memory/ratio

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On Fri, 2014-09-19 at 18:39 -0700, David Lang wrote

> > Well being used to something bad, doesn't mean things cannot get better.
> > Routers (to which I have some experience at), rarely have processes
> > running that wouldn't matter if they are randomly killed; on a desktop
> > system you immediately notice an issue, and you can reboot, a router is
> > typically running unattended. Being locked out of such a system because
> > another process had a memory leak, can be an issue.
> 
> Turning off overcommit so that a program that wants to spawn a child will end up 
> requiring double it's memory (for the time between the fork and the exec) is 
> likely to cause programs to fail when they don't need to.

I'd be surprised if fork and exec worked that way. After a fork the two
processes share the same physical pages (see the notes on fork()
manpage), and overcommit applies to physical ram, not virtual.

> And unlike desktops, you can't just say "allocate a lot of swap" to
> cover this up.

The same argument works the other way as well. A process using more
memory than the available in the router will force some other
(arbitrary) process to be killed. Unlike desktops you can't just say
"allocate a lot of swap" to cover this up.

What you _can_ do, is tell to the process that uses more memory than the
existing one, that there is no memory left.

> In spite of what some people say, it's far from a clear-cut win to
> disable overcommit.

I don't think anyone claims that.

regards,
Nikos
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