Hacker News Reader

The OOM killer will be just as shitty whether you have swap or not. But the more swap you have, the longer your program will be allowed to misbehave. I prefer a quick and painless death.

You can apply memory quotas to the individual processes with cgroups. You can also adjust how likely a process is to be killed.

Nowadays, the OOM killer always chooses the largest process in the system/cgroup by default.