Personally, I prefer things that use a huge amount of memory to die instead of having the machine become unresponsive, especially if I have latency-sensitive th

Personally, I prefer things that use a huge amount of memory to die instead of having the machine become unresponsive, especially if I have latency-sensitive things at the same time, like a conference call. Now, my main issue is that disabling swap doesn't cause this. With swap, OOM ends up being detected and corrected by the kernel. On some machines, it doesn't happen without swap, and often neither with swap. A sweet spot seems to be current-to-last CPU gen with 8 GB of memory. There's probably a lot of factors at play: what makes a task "hung"? How memory pressure is measured. Stuff probably changed with time, SSDs are now pretty quick, yet storage is a lot slower than RAM compared to what it used to be. Anyway, I use zram and have upgraded my memory, I'll also increase a bit my swap partition size in light of all of this. I'll probably have a look at userspace OOM daemons too.