I've seen people go to extreme lengths to avoid being a victim of overcommitted memory: http://www.baus.net/memory-management http://www.baus.net/memory-managem

I've seen people go to extreme lengths to avoid being a victim of overcommitted memory: http://www.baus.net/memory-management http://www.baus.net/memory-management Even after having the occasional run-in with the OOM killer and having to drive into work at 3am because sshd was among the casualties, I can't see thwarting the OS's virtual memory system like this. Besides, if you're really that worried about uptime that falling victim to the OOM killer is an unacceptable risk, you should be preparing for surprise hardware failure too, which in my experience is much more likely to happen anyway and can be just as fatal to your "invincible" process.