C Program on Linux to exhaust memory

Question

I would like to write a program to consume all the memory available to understand the outcome. I\'ve heard that linux starts killing the processes once it is unable to alloc

Answer 1

Linux "over commits" memory. This means that physical memory is only given to a process when the process first tries to access it, not when the malloc is first executed. To disable this behavior, do the following (as root):

echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

Then try running your program.