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Animatslast Friday at 8:13 PM1 replyview on HN

Setting 2 is still pretty generous. It means "Kernel does not allow allocations that exceed swap + (RAM × overcommit_ratio / 100)." It's not a "never swap or overcommit" setting. You can still get into thrashing by memory overload.

We may be entering an era when everyone in computing has to get serious about resource consumption. NVidia says GPUs are going to get more expensive for the next five years. DRAM prices are way up, and Samsung says it's not getting better for the next few years. Bulk electricity prices are up due to all those AI data centers. We have to assume for planning purposes that computing gets a little more expensive each year through at least 2030.

Somebody may make a breakthrough, but there's nothing in the fab pipeline likely to pay off before 2030, if then.


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silon42last Friday at 8:26 PM

For me, on the desktop, thrashing overload is the most common way the Linux system effectively crashes... (I've left it overnight a few times, sometimes it recovered, but not always).

I'm not disabling overcommit for now, but maybe I should.

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