Fwiw you can use pressure stall information to load shed. This is superior to disabling overcommit and then praying the first allocation to fail is in the process you want to actually respond to the resource starvation.

Fact is that by the time small allocations are failing you are almost no better off handling the null than you would be handling segfaults and the sigterms from the killer.

Often for servers performance will fall off a cliff long before the oom killer is needed, too.