Comment 13 for bug 27441

Problem remains.

It's a general Linux problem. Here's another annoyed guy who dubs it "the Achilles heel" of Linux, comparing it to (of all things) Windows 98:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/swap-thrashing-can-nothing-be-done-612945/

If you can fix this, I think it's worthy of a Slashdot story. The OOM killer did call for a lot of news stories back in the days. It's not easy to fix, but I think with complete control over the OS as is the case with Ubuntu, it's possible.

Also I guess it's a security problem on servers. You don't need root access to a machine, you just need shell access and a memory eating process, and you're ready to take down the machine. :)

So just to reiterate: a faulty process can allocate enough memory to push Linux into thrashing, constant paging out to the disk. This behaviour can continue for more than 30 minutes without any progress. Meanwhile the machine is unusable, doesn't respond to input of any kind. So the objective is to put in default safety guards to prevent this from ever happening by denying the faulty process more memory or terminating it, e.g. after having detected that the past say x seconds were spent thrashing.