I don't follow, it seems like you're still be hosed in this scenario. What's the difference of stopping accepting connections and rejecting queries vs crashing

I don't follow, it seems like you're still be hosed in this scenario. What's the difference of stopping accepting connections and rejecting queries vs crashing out? Meaningful work cannot make progress when a busy dynamic system is OOM -- which a database is a prime example of. Best to avoid the condition, or design the client side to handle the possibility the resource could be unavailable.