[billnapier]

Overcommit was a design decision that seems wrong at first, but when taken with a wide viewpoint makes some sense. The motivating reason for overccomit is to make fork cheap. (the article even briefly touched on this). It's a trade off between the speed of spawning new processes (and threads) and ease of understanding how your system will behave in low memory situations. I think they made the right choice.

Another thing to note. The systems in the article were in trouble regardless of the overcommit, it's just that overcommit hid the problem and made it occur in a non-obvious place.