alt Hacker NewsEvery time I've ran out of physical memory on Linux I've had to just reboot the machine, being unable to issue any kind of commands by input devices. I don't know what it is, but Linux just doesn't seem to be able to deal with that situation cleanly.
The mentioned situation is not running out of memory, but being able to use memory more efficiently.
Running out of memory is a hard problem, because in some ways we still assume that computers are turing machines with an infinite tape. (And in some ways, theoretically, we have to.) But it's not clear at all which memory to free up (by killing processes).
If you are lucky, there's one giant with tens of GB of resident memory usage to kill to put your system back into a usable state, but that's not the only case.