Linux allows memory overcommitment and Windows does not. On Windows, when the system is out of memory, attempts to allocate more will fail. Each running applica

Linux allows memory overcommitment and Windows does not. On Windows, when the system is out of memory, attempts to allocate more will fail. Each running application has to decide from there on out exactly what to do. On Linux, running processes can allocate more memory than is available, and the OOM condition is triggered when too much of that memory is actually used. Once that happens, the OS has to decide which process to kill in order to reclaim some memory.