Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ColonelPhantom 967 days ago
Yes, Windows doesn't have overcommit. (Also not with swap, since overcommit is unbacked virtual memory, which Windows still doesn't allow. The only thing it allows is disk-backed virtual memory).

But as a user, I don't care (except that I don't have to worry about an OOM killer because an allocation will just fail). The only real difference is that application developers need to be careful with allocating memory without using it, unlike on Unix-likes.

Because software on Linux runs on the assumption of overcommit, you shouldn't disable it, even though the lack of overcommit on Windows is not problematic.