Comment 7 for bug 182960

Like Steve, I used to think that "the Linux kernel will kill off the process responsible if it sees that too much memory is being used". But just two days ago on our Jaunty server with lots of GB RAM and no swap, a number of system processes were killed during a long-running memory-consuming calculation, including dbus-daemon, syslogd, console-kit-daemon. Although the server happily responded to ping, I couldn't login neither through ssh nor at the console. In the end I was forced to perform a hard reset.

It looks to me like there is a difference in the behaviour between a) the system going out of memory and b) a process reaching its memory limit. In case a) - i.e. no limit - the process to be killed is selected according to some score.

Attached is a screenshot from the remote access console.