Hi,

Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 14, 2020 11:50 am wrote:
> 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.

There are 2 things I'm reacting to here:

a) The "OOM killer". For example, if you have a process that is leaking memory then the amount of "RAM + swap" is mostly irrelevant (more swap just means it takes longer to cause problems), and the possibility of randomly killing X11 and screwing up every application (and not stopping the process that is leaking memory) is utterly idiotic.

b) People that think "swap is bad" and simply don't have any swap at all because they think crashing due to OOM is great for performance.

Now...

> Windows doesn't overcommit and that makes OOM crashes a lot more likely than on other platforms.

You need to be more specific. For example; compare "no overcommit, with 8 GiB of RAM and 1234 TiB of swap space" to "with overcommit, with 8 GiB of RAM and no swap space" and see how accurate your statement is.

> Windows doesn't overcommit and that makes OOM crashes a lot more likely than on other platforms.

No. Windows doesn't overcommit and uses a page file (rather than a swap partition) for swap space; and will not OOM until your file system runs out of space.

> 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.

Sure, these people failed to have an adequate amount of swap space.

> 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.

Sure, with an adequate amount of swap space those crashes simply wouldn't have happened.

- Brendan