oom-killer, vm.overcommit & swap

I believe that some of these random application crashes claiming to be out-of-memory have to do with the fact that swap is off by default.

Knowing that to be an issue from my experience with OpenEmbedded I preemptively set vm.overcommit_memory = 2 vm.overcommit_ratio = 100

in /etc/sysctl.conf

However, this seems to have made the issue worse.

Has the meaning of these values changed between 2.6.36 and .39? Or are the defaults used with Linaro / Ubuntu more appropriate for swapless systems and those values don't need to be set?

I'd appreciate any advise on how to use the full memory of my system and not get out-of-memory errors when I have 50%+ available memory.

AJ ONeal