That's how the story plays out for me on a desktop system if a single process starts running away with memory. But on a production server this is guaranteed to

That's how the story plays out for me on a desktop system if a single process starts running away with memory. But on a production server this is guaranteed to happen at the worst possible time (i.e. at the peak of the daily load cycle). As soon as you start swapping, it starts slowing down and the outstanding transactions begin stacking up. The response time goes all hockey-stick shaped and it's a death spiral.