I mean, the OOM killer's heuristics are byzantine to be sure. However, if your program is not likely to be the "true" culprit of memory exhaustion, there are be

I mean, the OOM killer's heuristics are byzantine to be sure. However, if your program is not likely to be the "true" culprit of memory exhaustion, there are better tools at your disposal than ballast pages--cgroups and tunable oomkillers like earlyoom (https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom). On the other hand, if you are likely to be identified as the culprit, I think the best you can hope for is getting some cleanup/reporting in before you're kill-9'd.