Hi. After having firefox killed by the OOM-killer due to a totem running wild (and watching the killer churn the disks for 5 minutes to do so, what the heck is it doing?), I ventured to try a hard overcommit limit (which setting vm.overcommit_memory=2 does, to the best of my knowledge). The system in question has 640MB RAM, no swap. The result is that almost nothing works, even with plenty of memory free. It's even impossible to get a simple man page to display: [sun@nausicaa ~/src/gmemusage-0.2 :) 23]$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 645152 366636 278516 0 16900 106340 -/+ buffers/cache: 243396 401756 Swap: 0 0 0 [sun@nausicaa ~/src/gmemusage-0.2 :) 24]$ man sysctl sh: fork: Cannot allocate memory sh: fork: Cannot allocate memory Error executing formatting or display command. System command (cd /usr/share/man && (echo ".ll 11.8i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /usr/bin/gunzip -c '/usr/share/man/man8/sysctl.8.gz'; echo ".\\\""; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl | nroff --legacy ISO-8859-1 -man -rLL=129n -rLT=129n 2>/dev/null | /usr/bin/less -iRs) exited with status 32768. No manual entry for sysctl The system has nearly 400MB of free memory. What does it take to display some lines of text these days? -- "It's one of those irregular verbs: I explore the possibilities of computing, you hack, he has been charged under section 2 of the computer misuse act..." -- Richard Watts