[justsomehnguy]

> I haven't personally seen the OOM killer kill unproductively

Ah, the classical linux fan adage: "never happened to me means never happens ever to anyone".

My favourite things to see with OOM:

killing mysql on the machine which hosts only mysql and is THE production;

and the best one - killing sshd. Of course I can report on that only after seeing it on the tty0 through the BMC/IPMI console or KVM console of a VM.