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I would be interested to see this compared to what I consider to be the null hypothesis: disabling overcommit altogether and handling out of memory at the application level.

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poor, because 1. fork exists, and 2. the application incurring OOM is statistically unlikely to be the one that should be killed on multi-application servers, and 3. 99.9% of applications do not correctly handle malloc returning NULL in 100% of cases. some make an effort, but except for stuff like SQLite, almost nobody tests it, so it's usually broken at least 1% of the time.

> 3. 99.9% of applications do not correctly handle malloc returning NULL in 100% of cases.

0% of applications correctly handle being unable to write to a page they were given as writable. It's certainly true that few applications correctly handle a failed malloc, and in many cases there's not really a correct way to handle it, but at least it's available to handle.

>the application incurring OOM is statistically unlikely to be the one that should be killed on multi-application servers Could you please explain this?

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