[jcgl]

Same experience here. Linux admin. I’d absolutely love to be told I’m holding it wrong, but all I can see is that there’s no way to hold it right.

Your consternation is seconded.

[baq]

It’s even worse than that… you can hard lock a system with significant freeable memory left if you have insane vm.dirty_* settings (which is of course the case by default)

[ahartmetz]

zram + no swap is a surprisingly workable workaround IME. The system slows down by a factor of 100 or so instead of 100000 or so, which allows to kill the offending process in a few seconds or have it killed by the OOM killer faster than a reboot.

[rcxdude]

The two mitigations are to: - (somewhat counterintuitively) have swap enabled - run something like earlyoom to stop the system from reaching a low-RAM situation in the first place.