Comment 41 for bug 1152736

FYI, I tried downgrading to 3.8-rc4-raring, and the problem was still reproducible.

Comparing notes with other folks who have similar setups and are not seeing this problem, my attention was drawn to the fact that I had /tmp on a tmpfs. I thought the tmpfs was probably not the problem, because I had tried size limiting it and was still seeing problems. However, after disabling use of tmpfs for /tmp six days ago (which probably no longer makes sense for my environment now that I have an SSD), the problem has not recurred, even though my usage pattern hasn't changed. I have seen instances where firefox has managed to be killed due to OOM, but I have not seen swap death with 80% of swap unused like I was seeing before.

So it seems likely that this is related to use of tmpfs.