Re: Several Different kernel related (?) problems

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 02:09:55PM +0200, Hans Kristian Rosbach wrote:
> [root linux10 vm]# cat overcommit_memory
> 0
> [root linux10 vm]# cat overcommit_ratio
> 50
> 
> Does this not mean that it is already off?

0 means "heuristic" - which tries to guess disaster but does overcommit
1 means "overcommit anything" - useful for some scientific computing things
2 means "strict" - limit is swap + ratio% of ram.

> Another thing I notice is that while memory does get full, it
> will not swap..  Even with 2.5GB free swap.

memory full and memory all needed are different things. Keeping memory full
is good so Linux will always try and do this.