> But in any case shouldn't OOM killer come to the rescue? Indeed. Its similar to the argument that segfaults are good due to fail fast. Wouldn't it be better

> But in any case shouldn't OOM killer come to the rescue? Indeed. Its similar to the argument that segfaults are good due to fail fast. Wouldn't it be better to fail fast due to OOM than to hobble along? If you're actively using the system, ok, you might get a chance to save your work or whatever first, but, in my personal anecdotal experience, that process is pretty much dead anyway and I have to kill it. Yes, my system doesn't get taken down, but if OOM takes the system down, why isn't the kernel killing the process that's eating all the memory? It sounds to me that swap is just masking the problem.