slow hard drives crushing interactivity

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 11:04:34AM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > You can set rlimits; you can also turn off overcommit. Doesn't help
> > the yum/rpm case, of course.
> 
> Can we do either of those things by default/automatically in appropriate
> cases?
> 

We should be shipping with overcommit off by default, but I've been saying 
that for years too 8. You can just drop it into /etc/sysctl.conf