I agree with the idea, but a nit: on 64-bit Linux with the default vm.overcommit_memory=0, their mallocs will likely continue to succeed. Those just expand the

I agree with the idea, but a nit: on 64-bit Linux with the default vm.overcommit_memory=0, their mallocs will likely continue to succeed. Those just expand the address space, which is probably not what your resource limits are controlling. [1] The actual limit [2] is hit when they try to use the virtual address space, causing a minor page fault (when it's backed by a zero-filled page of physical RAM). [1] You can add in such a limit via RLIMIT_AS, but it'd have a lot of collateral damage like preventing LMDB from mmap()ing a big database. I don't recommend this. [2] I'd recommend setting limits on a cgroup; with a systemd unit file, see MemoryMax= and friends in the systemd.resource-control(5) manpage.