Comment 37 for bug 159356

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Maxim Imakaev (mimakaev) wrote : Re: System freeze on high memory usage

I have experienced the same issue since I started using Ubuntu 8.04. Often one of the users will run a program which would take a lot of memory, and this would completely freeze graphics and make all text terminals very slow. Sometimes I run a code which accidentally allocates more than my 32GB RAM, and if I don't hit Ctrl+C within 1-2 seconds, it will never even go through in gnome-terminal. The only solution would be to SSH in to the machine and kill the process manually.

In some cases even ssh or console login do not help, and I have to wait for hours or reboot the machine.

I am surprised that there is no way to save 50-100 megabytes of RAM free for a root to log in and kill the process; it would be very helpful, especially when rebooting the computer is not possible.