Re: coping with swap-exhaustion in 2.4.33-4

["Yakov Lerner" <iler.ml@gmail.com>]

On 11/23/06, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 14:30 +0200, Yakov Lerner wrote:
> >     Where can I read anything about how kernel is supposed to
> > react to the 'swap-full' condition ? We have troubles on the
> > production machine which routinely arrives to the swap-full state
> > no matter how I increase the swap, because user proceses multi-fork
> > and then want to allocate a lot of virtual memory.
>
> Did you disable memory overcommit ?

When I set overcommit to 1 (2.4 seems not to have 1 vs 2
distinction, am I right), then still root processes are killed
when non-root process is a memory hog. Is there an option
to have malloc return NULL and never kill a process when
malloc fails ?

Thanks
Yakov