I would quite like to do some controlled experiments, with clean installations and rebuilds, on a variety of setups, and in particular would like to see the difference (if any) of running with vm overcommit, but I’m afraid I’ve lacked the time.
(Without overcommit, a large process which forks will have an instantaneous increase in memory footprint which might be fatal, and it won’t show up on a polled monitor. Even with overcommit, memory increase could be rapid enough not to show up on a poll, whether htop or vmstat or something else.)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone volunteer whether or not they are running with overcommit, although in my view it’s an important aspect of the host configuration.