This document discusses investigating the effects of overcommitting YARN resources in a Hadoop cluster. It presents a prototype design for allowing YARN to use more memory on each node than the node actually has by overcommitting resources. The goals are to minimize changes to applications and YARN protocols. It describes how the ResourceManager and NodeManager would handle overcommitting and preempting resources. Test results showed significant overcommit was achievable with less preemption than expected. Future work includes integrating it with YARN-1011 to distinguish guaranteed vs opportunistic resources and allow promotion once available.