[olug] understanding Linux memory usage

[Luke -Jr]

On Thursday 21 February 2008, Ryan Stille wrote:
> Ok, so doesn't this make the output of "free" and the free value shown
> in the top command *worthless*?  It may say you have 2GB free, so you
> think that server is running fine and could handle an additional task or
> something, but really that 2GB might be allocated to other processes
> that just haven't used the memory yet?

I think Linux is the only OS that overcommits on memory allocation.
BSD might do what you want, or perhaps there's a configuration option to 
disable overcommitting.