Submitted by “This article explains how a Solaris OS application with large memory requirements can effectively create a subprocess without unduly running out of memory or creating a deadlock. It also explores a related issue of how application memory is committed in the Solaris OS as opposed to other operating systems such as Linux.” Here’s a related article on ZFS and Solaris Containers
Overall a good read.
I sumbitted the following comments on their site:
I think “memory overcommit ” in this article is what’s called “Deferred Page Space Allocation (DPSA)” in AIX, which is the default page space allocation policy.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?top…
More importantly, one can set ” PSALLOC=early ” environment variable to enable “Early page space allocation” on process basis, which seems to be the equivalent to Solaris’s default policy.
So this feature doesn’t have to be “global for the entire system” (listed as one of the disadvantages), at least not on AIX.