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dasil003last Friday at 8:59 PM1 replyview on HN

Not sure if I understand your question but nothing "happens to the rest", overcommitting just means processes can allocate memory in excess of RAM + swap. The percentage is arbitrary, could be 50%, 100% or 1000%. Allocating additional memory is not a problem per se, it only becomes a problem when you try to actually write (and subsequently read) more than you have.


Replies

adastra22yesterday at 7:14 AM

They’re talking about the never-overcommit setting.