In article <199812160914.BAA01886@cue.bc.ca> jnemeth@cue.bc.ca (John Nemeth) writes:
> [...] However,
>some programs used sparse data structures, and would allocate huge
>ammounts of memory and only use a little bit of it.  They couldn't do
>this unless there were huge ammounts of swap space available.  Instead
>of smacking these programs upside the head, and telling them to use
>memory more efficiently, some "brilliant" person invented
>overcommitting of memory (I believe this was done in SysV). 

Actually we are all talking about AIX here. The overcommitting malloc
solution was created to address the problem of Fortran cad programs,
that were compiled with huge arrays (because there is no dynamic memory
allocation) and would not load to a normal workstation because it would
run out of swap.

christos