alt Hacker NewsSure, but you can do the next best thing, which is to control precisely when and where those allocations occur. Even if the possibility of crashing is unavoidable, there is still huge operational benefit in making it predictable.
Simplest example is to allocate and pin all your resources on startup. If it crashes, it does so immediately and with a clear error message, so the solution is as straightforward as "pass bigger number to --memory flag" or "spec out larger machine".
No, this is still misunderstanding.
Overcommit means that the act of memory allocation will not report failure, even when the system is out of memory.
Instead, failure will come at an arbitrary point later, when the program actually attempts to use the aforementioned memory that the system falsely claimed had been allocated.
Allocating all at once on startup doesn't help, because the program can still fail later when it tries to actually access that memory.