Comment 2 for bug 27392

I do not question that there are some situations, e.g. servers locked up in a
room, where this behaviour is fine. But I question the value of allowing one
buggy process to cause the system to freeze for more than 10 minutes on a
desktop system intended for ordinary users. Do you really think this is
reasonable behaviour?

Really, how hard can it be to detect this kind of situation?

if have been trashing for 10 seconds
  if one process consumes most of the memory and has grown > 100% in the past 20
seconds
    kill that process

Make it an option so that server people can switch it off. Or instead set
default ulimits in Ubuntu based on the available memory.

I reported this because I was hoping that a Ubuntu guy would be able to see this
from a desktop user's point-of-view. If I fix the process limits on this
particular desktop machine, it won't help the millions of other mere users who
have no idea what a process limit is.

I hope you will reconsider.