The Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure
Ah, yes, that bug.<p>Few programs can handle a fail return from &quot;malloc&quot;, and Linux perhaps tries too hard to avoid forcing one. Most programs just aren&#x27;t very good at getting a &quot;no&quot; to &quot;give me more memory&quot; Browsers should be better at this, since they started using vast amounts of memory for each tab.<p>I used to hit a worse bug on servers. If you did lots of MySQL activity, so that many blocks of open files were in memory, and then started creating processes, you&#x27;d often hit a situation where the Linux kernel needed a page of memory but couldn&#x27;t evict a file block due to some lock being set. Crash. That was years ago; I hope it&#x27;s been fixed by now.