This guy is wrong, for the record. The default behavior of malloc on linux involves kernel magic to decide whether to allocate the memory. Since he wasn't act

This guy is wrong, for the record. The default behavior of malloc on linux involves kernel magic to decide whether to allocate the memory. Since he wasn't actually writing any data to any of his ram, it didn't fail until he ran out of address space. If he'd actually used the memory, it would have failed sooner. The other, bigger problem is his assumption that all linux installations work like this. Frequently vm.overcommit_memory is set to disable malloc calls for more than the available amount of memory, which means the oom-killer never gets inolved. He's making a ton of dangerous assumptions based on tooling around with code instead of reading the documentation on the matter (i.e. malloc(3)). malloc can fail, and you should deal with it well: http://ewontfix.com/3/ http://ewontfix.com/3/