slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 11:52 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 11:04:34AM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > You can set rlimits; you can also turn off overcommit. Doesn't help
> > > the yum/rpm case, of course.
> > 
> > Can we do either of those things by default/automatically in appropriate
> > cases?
> > 
> 
> We should be shipping with overcommit off by default, but I've been saying 
> that for years too 8. You can just drop it into /etc/sysctl.conf
> 

So I have:
[root at localhost ~]# cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
0
[root at localhost ~]# cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio
50

I'm assuming those are the current defaults... what should the default
be to address this problem? (or what should I try first and report back
on?)

Havoc