On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 7:50 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 8:46 AM, Michael Coffman > <michael.coffman at avagotech.com> wrote: > > > >> Just because one machine fails gracefully does not mean the next will. > >> > > > > I don't even know what the above means. > > > > > >> But really buy some ram for real. OR solve the real problem. > >> > >> > > > > Well that's just ridiculous. 'Real problem'?. If I run a command to > > change a kernel value, I assume that my system will not be rendered > useless > > because it now believes all the memory is consumed. It seems like a > > problem to me no matter how much memory the machine has. > > If you are already overcommitted, what do you expect to happen when > you say not to allow that? The kernel doesn't have a really good way > to handle that situation (or any other OOM condition for that > matter...). > > OK. So I was confused because free shows I have plenty of memory and I am only now noticing that Committed_AS shows a very large value. This is largely an idle system: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2052176 951648 1100528 0 147580 626096 -/+ buffers/cache: 177972 1874204 Swap: 2052088 0 2052088 So my real question should have been why would the Committed_AS value be so large? Committed_AS: 137197248820 kB On the exact same hardware with fresh build of centos5u4 and overcommit turned on: Committed_AS: 125716 kB -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > -- -MichaelC