slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 01:22:54PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> [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?)

2 and 50 assuming you have swap. In that mode the system will refuse to 
let you create anything that might drive the box into overcommit. It works
better yet in 2.6.10 as Andries modified the kernel to pre-reserve the
pages for a typical stack so that programs didn't get killed occasionally
by stack expand failure (it reserves the space not allocates the memory so
its impact on performance is nil)

Alan