It can. System-wide it's one extreme or another. With overcommit enabled, you'll pretty much never get refused. With overcommit disabled, you'll get refusals was soon as you reach the max memory, which means lots of mapped pages wasting space.
The middle ground is your own config unfortunately - cgroups can limit available memory, but you'll have to set it up by hand.
The middle ground is your own config unfortunately - cgroups can limit available memory, but you'll have to set it up by hand.