I once ran into an issue on a GNU Mailman host putting out an email storm and the load average was > 800 on an x86 Solaris box that probably only had 4x AMD cores. I was eventually able to get in as root on the serial console and fix it. Back in those days it was almost shameful to just reboot something vs. slogging through and trying to fix it. Also I miss not having to deal with OOM issues.