Ladavac Marino wrote:
> 
>         This topic has been trashed to death a few months ago.  There is no
> win-win situation in presence of processes which allocate a lot of memory
> without actually using it (read: your typical FORTRAN library).

This is not about just Fortran libraries. Imagine a reasonably big
program, like Netscape or Emacs, of which you usually just use a
subset of features. There can easily be many megabytes of code and
data in them you never actually use, or you don't _usually_ use
(like the people who use emacs like it was vi :). Without
overcommit, you need to allocate all that memory for the code, no
matter whether you end up using it or not. With overcommit, there is
no such problem.

And that's not all, either.

Hell, people, if overcommit was not useful, everybody wouldn't be
doing it.

--
Daniel C. Sobral			(8-DCS)
dcs@newsguy.com
dcs@freebsd.org

	"Would you like to go out with me?"
	"I'd love to."
	"Oh, well, n... err... would you?... ahh... huh... what do I do
next?"