I haven't toyed with that in a long time (probably about a decade really) but back when I did it was still very difficult to get the OOM to behave the way you w

I haven't toyed with that in a long time (probably about a decade really) but back when I did it was still very difficult to get the OOM to behave the way you wanted. IIRC the scoring is fairly complex and take child processes into account so while it's technically completely deterministic it can still be fairly tricky to anticipate how it's going to work out in practice. And I did know about `oom_adjust`. Often it worked. Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it would work too well and not kill a process that was clearly using an abnormal amount of memory. Finding the right `oom_adjust` is an art more than a science. Overall I ended up in the camp "you shouldn't throw passengers out of the plane"[1]. The best way to have the OOM killer behave well is not to have it run at all. If I don't have enough RAM just panic and let me figure out what needs to be done. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/ https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/