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Date:      Tue, 13 Jul 1999 16:20:35 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Archie Cobbs <archie@whistle.com>
To:        dillon@apollo.backplane.com (Matthew Dillon)
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Replacement for grep(1) (part 2)
Message-ID:  <199907132320.QAA73479@bubba.whistle.com>
In-Reply-To: <199907132131.OAA80991@apollo.backplane.com> from Matthew Dillon at "Jul 13, 99 02:31:38 pm"

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Matthew Dillon writes:
> :> ram and 512MB of swap (4MB of swap in use), but the kernel reports over
> :> 3 GB of VM assigned to processes.  That's a fairly lightly loaded machine.
> :
> :What you say is generally true; however, the problem is that *you*
> :are making implicit assumptions about what applications *I* might
> :have in mind. I just think that's a presumptous thing to do unless
> :you can read minds..
> :
> :For example:
> :
> :- I could be creating a "Java OS" that is going to have a single process,
> :  ie, the Java VM, that can handle ENOMEM (which translates into an
> :  OutOfMemoryException, which can be caught) but otherwise *must not die*.
> 
>     .... just one process?  Set a resource limit!  If you have 64MB of swap,
>     then limit the size of the Java OS process to 50MB.    Now the java
>     process will get a nice malloc failure instead of getting killed by
>     the kernel.

That would work too I suppose.. but the larger point is that, who knows
what strange/crazy things people might want to do? (Maybe somebody just
wants to try it for some kind of empirical test?)

Aside from all the hype on either side, the fact that there is even
an argument about it means that some people would like to at least
have the ability to turn off overcommit. So if it's not a problem to
add the sysctl, why not do it? Let them shoot their feet off if that's
what will happen.

-Archie

___________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs   *   Whistle Communications, Inc.  *   http://www.whistle.com


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