In my experience, swap usually does not actually work out helpfully. The system slows down so much it's unusable, and you wish the OOM killer killed something s

In my experience, swap usually does not actually work out helpfully. The system slows down so much it's unusable, and you wish the OOM killer killed something so you can recover some processes/state, but it takes way too long to do so, many minutes while the system is effectively frozen and you are helpless. (Some people think the OOM killer kicks in too soon. They're crazy ;) I also ran into this when setting memory limits on docker containers. It basically made them freeze for entire minutes when they hit the limit instead of killing them. So instead I wrote my own script to check and signal them to gracefully exit before memory runs out (and after a few more seconds SIGKILL them).