The OOM killer might eventually kill something, after it thrashes the system for a few hours. I had a server last week in which swap hadn't been configured. A

The OOM killer might eventually kill something, after it thrashes the system for a few hours. I had a server last week in which swap hadn't been configured. A compilation job took all memory and the OOM started thrashing. Thankfully there's always one SSH session open but I couldn't kill anything, sync or shutdown; fork failed with insufficient memory. Left if thrashing overnight and had to power-kill it next day.