Talk:Memory overcommitment

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Generalize[edit]

@Ironholds: Memory overcommit is a much more general concept in operating system memory management and isn't necessarily tied to virtualization. -- intgr [talk] 11:38, 20 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Intgr: if you can give me some example sources I'm happy to weave those in; I operated from the sources available to me. Ironholds (talk) 14:29, 20 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Ironholds: Googling around, it does indeed appear that the virtualization community has largely hijacked this term because it never was a "hot topic" before. But here are some sources I could find quickly: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

But the fact that Linux (and other operating systems in some cases) may hand out more memory than they actually have, is a well known fact.

From a cursory reading, there appears to be a significant difference in how the terms are used. In OS terminology, "overcommitting" is when the OS allows applications to allocate more memory than RAM+swap space. But in virtualization, exceeding physical RAM is already considered overcommitting. -- intgr [talk] 15:18, 20 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sweet; thanks! I'll take a look at those this evening :). Ironholds (talk) 17:38, 20 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Windows Overcommit[edit]

The article claims that "Windows NT contained overcommitment features" . Is there a source for this claim? I'm very interested in this, since I thought that at least modern Windows don't actually overcommit memory (as in allowing programs to allocate more RAM than the total size of available swap + RAM). Avl (talk) 19:54, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]