> However, IME, OoM just leads to the problematic program being quickly killed, I think this is the divide. In my experience, OOM killer rarely kills the culp

> However, IME, OoM just leads to the problematic program being quickly killed, I think this is the divide. In my experience, OOM killer rarely kills the culprit. It doesn't actually know which programs are behaving irregularly (that's the 'trick' in his 'trick question') and the OOM score heuristic isn't reliable in desktop usecases. If you know ahead of time which process will likely cause you trouble, you can adjust oom_score_adj for that process to make it the first target, but this is not great for common desktop use.