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It will most likely not happen? It's absolutely possible to write a program that forks and both forks overwrite 99% of shared memory pages. It almost never happens, which is GP's point, but it's possible and the reason it's a fragile hack.

What usually happens in practice is you're almost OOM, and one of the processes running in the system writes to a page shared with another process, forcing the system to start good ol' OOM killer.

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99% isn't 100%.

Sorry, but no, it can't happen, you can not fork a process and end up with twice the memory requirements just because of the fork. What you can do is to simply allocate more memory than you were using before and keep writing.

The OOM killer is a nasty hack, it essentially moves the decision about what stays and what goes to a process that is making calls way above its pay grade, but overcommit and OOM go hand in hand.

It does not happen using fork()/exec() as described above. For it to happen we would need to fork() and continue using old variables and data buffers in the child that we used in the parent, which is a valid but rarely used pattern.

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