slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 14:53 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> 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)
> 

Hmm, that made evolution exit within 2 minutes of enabling it ;-) Maybe
I need the 2.6.10 fix...

Havoc