Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> What I don't understand is the problem with overcommitting.
The problem with Linux overcommit is that when the kernel does run out
of memory, the process it chooses to kill isn't necessarily one that was
using an unreasonable amount of memory. The earlier versions were quite
willing to kill "init" ;-) ... I think they hacked it to prevent that
disaster, but it's still entirely capable of deciding to take out the
(real) postmaster, your mail daemon, or other processes you'd prefer not
to lose. As such, the feature is really too dangerous to enable on
machines being used for production purposes.
regards, tom lane