b...@softjar.se (Johnny Billquist) writes: >> They might be the reason for the memory shortage. You can prefer large >> processes as victims or protect system services to keep the system >> managable.
>So when one process tries to grow, you'd kill a process that currently >have no issues in running? All processes have issues on that system and the goal is to keep things alive so that you can recover, a system hang, crash or reboot is the worst outcome. Obviously there is no heuristic that can predict what action will have the best outcome and which causes the least damage. Guessing on the cost of various kinds of damage is an impossible task by itself as that is fairly subjective. But there can be a heuristic that helps in many cases, and for the rest you can hint the system.