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Iirc, systemd-oomd comes from oomd which comes from Facebook who had issues with the kernel oom killer. (The kernel oom killer, especially with slow swap, can also take ages to activate, which means you're just down the entire time, and it's better to kill stuff more often than to sometimes freeze.)

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I've had real-world downtime as a result of exactly this. The kernel OOM often takes forever to kick in. Like 10 to 15 minutes is not uncommon.

The most facepalm one was somebody uploaded their `.vimrc` which had a bug that infinitely recursed the parent directory loading ctags until it gobbled up all available memory and crashed. So every time he opened vim, it started about a 40 second timer of doom unless vim was exited before memory exhausted. Took forever to figure it out too, because he often only opened files for 10 seconds or less, short enough not to trigger the OOM.

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