Re: Memory settings, vm.overcommit, how to get it really safe?

Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Scott Marlowe:
>
>
>> What distro / kernel version of linux are you running?  We have a
>> similar issue with late model hardware and RHEL4 recently here at
>> work, where our workstations are running out of memory.  They aren't
>> running postgresql, they're java dev workstations and it appears to be
>> a RHEL4 on 64 bit problem, so that's why I ask.
>>
>
> When Java sees that your machine has got plenty of RAM and more than
> one CPU, it assumes that it's a server and you want to run just a
> single VM, and configures itself to use a fair chunk of available RAM.
>
> This is more or less a Sun-specific issue.  Other Java implementations
> make different choices.
Yeah, but these boxes run out of free mem, buffer, cache and swap.  On a
machine with 4 gigs ram and 2 gigs swap, something is seriously wrong
when all that ram just disappears, and it isn't just with java apps,
though most of what the developers run are java apps / servers.  We've
had a machine with mozilla (no java extension in it) run out of memory
just sitting idle.