Brendan (btrotter.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 13, 2020 1:50 pm wrote:
> Yes; this is why I advocate "virtual memory, without overcommit (with swap)". The idea is that the memory
> you reserve up front (that doesn't get used) is mostly just swap space that doesn't get used.

Windows doesn't overcommit and that makes OOM crashes a lot more likely than on other platforms. You can't commit more memory than the total amount of physical memory plus the swap space, even if you don't touch it. I've seen crash reports where the user still had multiple gigabytes of free physical memory but the process went OOM because it hit the commit space limit. In most cases it was because the graphics driver had committed a bunch of memory it might need to swap out textures in case it run out of video memory, but never actually used it. With overcommitting those crashes simply wouldn't have happened.