“Having applications that use up all the available memory can be
a fairly painful experience. For Linux systems, it generally means
a visit from the out-of-memory (OOM) killer, which will try to find
processes to kill. As one would guess, coming up with rules
governing which process to kill is challenging—someone,
somewhere, will always be unhappy with a choice the OOM killer
makes. Avoiding it altogether is the goal of the mem_notify
patch.“When memory gets tight, it is quite possible that applications
have memory allocated–often caches for better performance–that
they could free…”