Comment 6 for bug 182960

I believe the problem is when an application allocates memory in very small chunks. The OOM killer works well if you ask for 5GB and there is only 1GB in the system, but nothing prevents an app from taking up all available memory, forcing the system to grind to a halt and even if it might recover after several hours... once it crosses the limit. That's not enough because the system is dead in the mean time.

BTW, I've had this problem repeatedly in the past with evolution and file-roller.