Yes. Memory allocated, but not written to, still counts toward your limit, unlike in overcommit modes 0 or 1.
The default is to hope that not enough applications on the system cash out on their memory and force the system OOM. You get more efficient use of memory, but I don’t like this approach.
And as a bonus, if you use overcommit 2, you get access to vm.admin_reserve_kbytes which allows you to reserve memory only for admin users. Quite nice.
Isn’t there a trade off though?
Yes. Memory allocated, but not written to, still counts toward your limit, unlike in overcommit modes 0 or 1.
The default is to hope that not enough applications on the system cash out on their memory and force the system OOM. You get more efficient use of memory, but I don’t like this approach.
And as a bonus, if you use overcommit 2, you get access to
vm.admin_reserve_kbyteswhich allows you to reserve memory only for admin users. Quite nice.